


The Old Ones Are Coming

by susiecarter



Category: DC Extended Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Apocalypse, Body Horror, M/M, Podfic Available, Possession, Psychological Horror, Superbat Reverse Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 17:03:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14573532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susiecarter/pseuds/susiecarter
Summary: Eldritch abomination AU: Bruce is more than just the Gotham Batman, and has been ever since he fell into that cave as a child—ever since something in the shadows down there reached out and cracked him open. He doesn't want to destroy the universe; but it might not be up to him. And if he can't stop himself, maybe there's a chance that Clark can.(Or maybe that's too much to ask even of Superman.)





	The Old Ones Are Coming

**Author's Note:**

> I'm absolutely thrilled to have had the chance to claim Jol's prompt, which in a single image gave me everything I needed to just totally run away with this premise. :D Please drop everything and check it out [here on Tumblr](http://jolbalrok.tumblr.com/post/173682588785/superbat-reverse-bang-2018-i-had-the-pleasure-to), where you can like/reblog it to your heart's content!
> 
> And Jol did me the incredible favor of not only providing me with a fantastically creepy playlist to write to (which can be reached above from the art post), but also linking me to the [R'lyehian translator](https://lingojam.com/RLyehian) I used for the (brief) instance of otherworldly dialogue I needed. I couldn't possibly have done this without him, and he was a very gracious and helpful bang partner. And also didn't flinch when I sent him the forty-page first draft. :D
> 
> I also owe an ENORMOUS extra-strength thank-you to [blue_jack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_jack) for kindly looking this over for me on _very_ short notice—the second opinion was invaluable and your suggestions and sharp eye were exactly what I needed! ♥ THANK YOU. Any remaining errors and flaws are 100% on me.
> 
> As the title, summary, and artwork suggest, this is a Lovecraftian horror AU; it leans particularly hard on elements from [The Call of Cthulhu](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx), and (to a lesser extent) [At the Mountains of Madness](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx) (basically, Professor Angell and his backstory/the aspects of it that are used here are not my own invention, though Ruby Yeung is; and "weird happenings in Antarctica" is a plot point that dovetails neatly with both elements of Superman canon and Lovecraft). Other references include certain epithets in the opening paragraphs/some dialogue, and the use of "Miskatonic" as the name of a university. :D A whole bunch of the rest is just me, though, and I can only hope the horror elements are sufficient to do Jol's prompt justice! (The body horror is pretty mild, the rest is very impressionistic, but I thought it was better to tag for it than not.)
> 
> And one more very big thank-you to the mods for the opportunity to claim this prompt, and for their generosity and flexibility wrt due dates and draft turn-in. ♥
> 
> ETA: The lovely and generous [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods) has now [done a podfic of this story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14620890), too! :D

 

 

_They were, and They are, and They shall be. They dwell in the spaces between, in the great unbroken dark, in which no light has or does or ever shall fall. And there They walk dread paths, paths that lead to gates that shall open for Them, when the stars are ready ..._

_... and They listen to the Words that are spoken, and the Rites that are performed bring to Them dreams of the glory that was Theirs—that was, and is, and shall be. For it has and it does and it shall come to pass that He who is Theirs shall rise; They shall speak His name and He shall hear Them and come awake, He who is the servant of Their will. And He shall stand before Them and throw wide the gate, for only He shall hold the key ..._

_... He knows the gate. He is the gate. He is the lock and He is the key. Who hath ever known His name? Who hath the tongue to speak it? It is such as no mortal voice may utter. He shall be called many things: the Gate and the Lock and the Key, the Song of Depthless Shadows, the Prince of the Screaming Void ... He, who shall open the way, the Master of the Asp and the Deathless Waste and the Sealed Tower; the Guardian of the Lightless Pharos, the Endless, the Undying; the Son of the Bat ..._

 

 

 

**PART ONE: CATALYSIS**

 

**thirty-six years before alignment.**

Mom and Dad are dead.

Bruce knows it. He watched them die. He understands what it means, that they were shot and they fell down and didn't get back up, that they wouldn't answer him, that they stopped moving. He understood even before everyone insisted on explaining it to him over and over and over.

But he doesn't quite believe it until the funeral.

They look all right. They look like they're sleeping. But then their coffins close, and they get carried outside, and they're going to the mausoleum. Mom's the one who taught him that word, years ago—and she's the one who told him, when he got scared, how it works. That nobody who goes in there, goes in for real, ever comes out.

He'd been happy about it, then. He'd been having nightmares about stone parting, things rising up from the cracks. She'd been trying to make him feel better, but—

But she wouldn't have lied. That's how it works, and if she and Dad go in there like this, they'll—they—they won't ever—

Bruce isn't allowed to go anywhere by himself when it's dark, or when the weather is bad. But today it's sunny. It's sunny, and he's been doing what he's been told all day long; Alfred's not on his guard. One sharp jerk breaks Alfred's grip, and Bruce doesn't turn around at the sound of his name, and everyone is busy shutting his parents up in their graves. No one is quick enough to catch him.

The undergrowth snags his ankles, scuffs his shoes. The thin branches bend and snap and sting as he shoves through them. But it's not enough to make him want to stop. He keeps running and running and running, until his breath is scraping in his throat and his legs are burning, and then all at once he's not.

For a long stretched-out moment he doesn't even know what's going on; he can't figure out why there's so much wind or where the ground went, where the sky is, why all at once it's so dark. And then he lands, a sharp shock that knocks the breath out of him so completely that even the pain in his leg can't force a sound out of his throat.

And then it happens.

When Alfred asks about it afterward, Bruce doesn't know what to tell him. He doesn't have the words for it, and even if he did he's not sure he'd be able to say them. It's—the cavern was _so_ dark, and somehow it hadn't just been shadow. He'd been dazed, in pain, afraid; and then the bats had swarmed, and he'd—he couldn't take it. It had broken him, cracked him open, all the known familiar pieces of himself retreating in a spasm of blind terror. And whatever was left, there was something down there in that pit that had known him. It had known him, and named him, and reached out to touch him, and its gaze had pierced him open clean to the heart of himself—

He doesn't remember anything else. It's Alfred who tells him how they'd found him: alone, and the whole cavern plainly empty of anything except a load of cold damp rocks and that swarm of bats. Bruce had screamed, hissed, when they'd shone a light on him. He'd clawed at their hands and murmured incomprehensible words—bitten himself, too, because his mouth, his tongue, had bled after. When they'd gotten him back up into the sunlight, he'd been shuddering, almost seizing, but finally silent, and after a few minutes he'd allowed Alfred to calm him, and then seemingly dropped unconscious.

Alfred offers to let him sleep with the lights on, that night.

Bruce thinks about it. For longer than it should take him, probably, but Alfred doesn't rush him.

Longer than it should take him, because he knows what the answer has to be. "No," he says at last. "No, that's all right."

"Are you sure, Master Bruce?" Alfred settles a careful hand on Bruce's leg—not the one with the bandage, the other—and looks at him gravely. "It's no trouble," he adds, very low.

"No," Bruce says. "It doesn't matter whether the lights are on or not." He hesitates, because he doesn't know how to explain it, not even to Alfred, but— "They know me now," he tries. "They can find me again if they want to. It doesn't have anything to do with the lights."

Alfred looks at him, brow furrowing gradually into a frown. "You mean the bats, Master Bruce?" he says, after a long moment.

Bruce closes his eyes. Alfred had helped look for Bruce, he'd come down into the cavern. Bruce had thought he might have noticed something, seen something. That he'd have felt it, maybe: the chill left behind, the clinging dark. That he'd understand.

But it's not Alfred's fault he wasn't there. It's not Alfred's fault he doesn't know.

"No," he says anyway, "no, not the—never mind. I'm okay, Alfred."

"If you're certain, Master Bruce," Alfred says gently, patting his knee and then standing, reaching to ruffle Bruce's hair. "I am here for you, if you need anything—anything at all."

"I know that," Bruce says, and Alfred smiles at him and steps toward the door.

He does stand there at the threshold for a bit longer than Bruce expects, still watching Bruce; and when the smile's gone, he just looks grave and tired, and maybe a little sorry. But all he says is, "Goodnight, then," before he flips the light off.

That's the nice thing about Alfred, Bruce thinks. He listens, even when he doesn't understand.

Because Bruce told the truth: the dark in here doesn't bother him. He can tell, now, and the dark in here—

The dark in here doesn't have anything inside of it.

Not yet.

 

 

 

**twenty-eight years before alignment.**

Alfred wakes with a jolt, and for a moment he isn't sure why: the manor is silent, his room lit only by a sliver of moonlight creeping between the drapes he hadn't quite fastened. He hears no sounds, remembers no dreams. There's no reason his heart should be pounding. But then—

A cry, muffled but audible. Alfred closes his eyes.

It's to be one of the bad nights, then.

They are fewer and farther between now than they had been when Master Bruce was a child. And yet they seem to compensate for it by their intensity. It's been—six months now? No, seven, seven and change; and yet the last time Alfred had woken trembling in the middle of the night, he'd found Master Bruce sobbing, incoherent, scraping with strange repetitive gestures at the walls. Twice as frightening simply because it had been Master Bruce, who even at seventeen is so self-possessed, so self-contained. And yet—

And yet in a way, deep in his heart, Alfred is pitiably grateful for the bad nights. If it were up to Bruce, he'd never spill a word of what troubled him, never spend a moment less than wholly self-assured; Alfred can almost see it in his eyes every time the decision is made not to speak his heart where Alfred will hear, every time Bruce chooses to close himself up a little tighter instead. It troubles Alfred and pains him in equal measure, but to draw attention to it would surely only result in Bruce redoubling his efforts—and, if anything, exercising greater care in concealing them.

But on the bad nights, it just isn't possible. On the bad nights, Bruce's need for comfort is visible, audible, undeniable; and Alfred is, however briefly, permitted to provide it.

He doesn't delay any longer, rolls free of his bed and hastens barefooted to the door. The manor's halls and corridors are so familiar to him that he could walk them with his eyes closed—and some of them are so blackly shadowed that he might as well be doing precisely that. He reaches Master Bruce's door and is, for an instant, set back on his heels: it's open. It shouldn't be; Bruce keeps it closed, and Alfred makes an effort to remember to shut it himself, in accordance with Bruce's tacit wishes. But it's open now, just by a handspan. Dim light is creeping hazily along the hallway from the bay window, but Master Bruce's drapes must be fully closed, and the resulting effect is odd—the door opening into a deeper blackness than anywhere else around it, an appearance almost of shadow spilling free from beyond it rather than light—

Another cry, and Alfred remembers himself, starts forward and pushes the door wide. It's not an unfamiliar sight anymore. Master Bruce is pressed up against the walls in the very farthest corner, gasping and trembling, eyes screwed shut—or, no, not just gasping but muttering, wild breathless words Alfred cannot hope to parse, filled with harsh consonants that grate on Alfred's ears. And Bruce is scrabbling sightlessly, helplessly, at—is that something written on the wall?

Even as Alfred crosses the room, everything snaps into place, a clear cold urgency jolting down his spine. Because it isn't writing—it's blood, smeared in loops and scrawling angles, traced out by the tips of Bruce's fingers where he's scraped them raw against the wall—

"Master Bruce," Alfred says, in the firm but calm tone he's learned is best for these situations. Shouting too loudly, moving too fast, is a mistake Alfred only had to make once; Bruce has been putting in quite a bit of practice in the workout space downstairs, and his punch is steadily improving. "Master Bruce," and he leans down and catches Bruce carefully by the wrist, draws one of those bloody hands away from the wall—it's difficult, Bruce is fighting him, but Alfred's grip is solid and Bruce is still asleep.

And then, all at once, he isn't. His head turns, sudden and purposeful, and his eyes are open—

What Alfred remembers of it afterward is fractional, piecemeal, and doesn't make sense in any case. It's impossible, that Bruce should have had not open eyes but no eyes at all, only flat blank space; that the shape of his head should have abruptly become so inhumanly strange, that he should have opened the gash of his mouth and shown such _teeth_ —that his voice, that breathless, relentless murmuring, should have become all at once so loud that Alfred could not so much hear it as _feel_ it, and that the words spoken by it should have sent him crashing, mindless and unhesitating, to his knees.

He starts to come back together, a little while after. He's—prone, on the floor. He feels strange, bruised, as if he'd strained a great deal, or had been battered by some intense force. There's warmth, wetness, trickling from one ear, the corner of his mouth—blood—and along the lines of his face—tears? He drags in one breath, another, and with excruciating slowness is able to ease onto his side, to settle a palm against the floor and think about perhaps one day pushing himself up off of it.

And then, as if from a very long way away, through the ear that isn't actively bleeding, he hears someone saying something: "—sorry, I'm sorry—stop it, _stop it_ , go back. Go back, get out—get _out_ —"

Bruce. Alfred feels his lips shape the name, but cannot say it; his mouth is—is full of blood, and he doesn't know why. He swallows, thick and awkward, shuddering at the taste, and then a helpless sound catches in the back of his throat from the sudden sharp pain. His tongue, dear god—but he braces himself and tests, and he must only have bitten in, not through.

Leftover wetness is smearing his vision. He blinks once and then again, and can finally pick out the figure of Master Bruce: shoulders tensed, arms straining, but Bruce is facing the wall. And there's something, Alfred thinks dimly, something about the line of his spine beneath his t-shirt, that's not _right_.

"Master Bruce," and it comes out weak and faltering, but at least this time it does come out. Alfred doesn't know what he means to say next, to—to warn Bruce about the awful rippling thing his back is doing, or to tell him that his hands are still bleeding, that he should—he needs to do something about his hands.

Bruce turns in a rush. For the barest instant, the dark follows after; impossible, impossible, but Alfred flinches mindlessly anyway, curling awkwardly on the floor in a spasm of animal defensiveness.

And then it's gone. It's all gone. Bruce is only Bruce. He'd reached out toward Alfred, jerked to a stop when Alfred cringed from him; and now he's looking at his hands, his streaked bloody fingertips.

"I shouldn't touch you," he says, very steadily, though his eyes are wide and wet. "I shouldn't touch you like this. Alfred, I'll—don't move. Stay there. I just, I—I need to wash my hands."

"Of course," Alfred manages; inane, under the circumstances, but it seems to be what Master Bruce needs to hear. And it is—

It is, bizarrely, true. Or at least it feels that way. In the dimness, the blood on Bruce's hands looks so dark—black, like some strange viscous grime. Alfred cannot deny a wordless sense that it is indeed imperative that Bruce be cleansed of it, that if Bruce reached for him again he could not help but lean away. And he couldn't bear to. The look on Bruce's face the first time—he mustn't do that again. He knows full well that Bruce wouldn't harm him.

It's only—

It's only that it hadn't seemed to _be_ Bruce, in there.

Ridiculous, Alfred tells himself. It had been Bruce; he'd been suffering night terrors, sleepwalking, and Alfred had grabbed for him too hastily, had been pushed reflexively away and had fallen. Concussion, disorientation—of course his eyes couldn't be trusted, of course his perceptions had been off. He puts the thought from his mind, concentrates on measuring the evenness of his own breaths, the increasing steadiness of his hands. By the time Bruce returns, he's managed to draw himself up into a sitting position, resting against the wall.

Bruce flicks the light on to its lowest setting, and by it Alfred sees the worst of the tension leave his shoulders. And it is—better, with the light. Somehow easier to breathe.

Bruce has brought a damp towel, a dry one, a bowl of water, a disorganized stack of gauzes and bandages of all types and sizes. He reaches immediately for Alfred's face, the steady trickle of blood that must by now be working its way toward Alfred's collar, and Alfred feels no urge to flinch from him whatsoever.

"You realize I will be redoing those at the earliest possible opportunity," Alfred murmurs, tilting his head to allow Bruce to swab more thoroughly at his throat, and thereby getting a very good look at the hasty bandages Bruce wound haphazardly around his own fingertips.

Bruce's jaw tightens. "I'm fine."

"Master Bruce—"

"I'm _fine_. You're the one who—" and then Bruce's face cracks, crumples; Alfred catches his wrist in one hand, the opposite shoulder in the other, and _feels_ the sob Bruce refuses to let him hear.

"I'm all right," Alfred tells him, and repeats it through the shake of the head, Bruce twisting his face away and tensing against Alfred's grip, until at last Bruce eases again—until it's plausible that Bruce has in fact heard it.

"I'm sorry," Bruce says at last, very low. He's still turned half away, face hidden by the angle of the light and the flop of rebellious teenaged hair; and it's not that he doesn't want to meet Alfred's eyes, Alfred thinks, but that he's afraid to.

There are any number of things Alfred might say in response. That it's all right, yet again, because it's true—however much Master Bruce may resent the platitude. That Alfred himself should have been more careful, shouldn't have approached Bruce so suddenly or grabbed him so tightly. Concussion; disorientation. That's all it was.

But instead he finds himself telling Bruce, "It wasn't you. All right? It wasn't you," with an unaccountable urgency in his tone, heedless of the pain in his clumsy, swelling tongue. "It wasn't you."

And Bruce breathes out slow, shivering, and doesn't answer.

 

 

 

**eighteen years before alignment.**

"Can you see anything?"

Clark squints into the distance, and tries to decide what a reasonable answer might be.

On the one hand, he obviously can't tell the truth. The blowing snow and sheer distance won't allow for it. On the other hand, he's been on this particular emergency search-and-rescue team for a while—ever since he had to quit that construction gig, after getting a little too lucky around a few too many toppling beams. At this point, they've accepted his carefully-calibrated stories about 20/10 vision, unusually good hearing; they're willing to buy that he can spot things other people can't, willing to keep digging when he says they should even when he can't tell them there's still a heartbeat under this particular pile of rubble.

So it's not as risky as it might otherwise be, to say, "Not much—might be something off a little to the right?"

Youngston squints in the general direction of Clark's motion and then shakes her head, but doesn't argue. "Okay, Kent," she says instead. "Worth a shot."

As the helicopter veers closer, Clark stops looking. He can hear everything he needs to hear already; there's no one down there to get.

Not any of the official expedition members, anyway. When the helicopter finally settles its skids to the snow, Clark jumps out and heads straight for what looks like a particularly high drifted bank—but it's not. Somebody had the time to build a snow corral for the dogs and sling a tent over it. They're whining, hungry, but alive, and Clark reaches in to pet their heads, necks, backs, leans in to let them lick his face, and doesn't think about what's lying behind him in the snow.

Not until Adesso and Youngston yell for him. Then he can't avoid it anymore.

"Jesus Christ," Adesso is saying, over and over, as Clark reluctantly jogs closer. "Jesus Christ."

Clark swallows. He saw plenty from overhead, while they were still miles out. Not the details, though he could've if he'd tried; it had been enough to see the blood, splattered arcs and stains and splashes, the snow flurrying down and melting in it.

It's frozen now, of course. Everything is, rime of frost on their hands, their faces—they're half-buried, Youngston mechanically sweeping the snow off them and muttering, "Fuck, what the hell were they doing? Why'd they take off their gloves?"

Their gloves, their hats—hoods tipped back, some of them, and a couple even have jackets, parkas, unzipped. Clark knows it happens like that, sometimes; that before people freeze to death they start to feel warm, hot, and they're too disoriented to realize it can't be possible. But looking at them all like this, seeing so clearly how far gone they were right before the end—it sends a shiver crawling up Clark's spine, makes the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up straight.

"Jesus Christ," Adesso murmurs again.

And the blood is—it makes Clark sick, low in his gut, to see the ones who were obviously in pain, thrashing. But the others are almost worse: the ones who look like they just lay down and opened themselves up, and didn't even feel it.

Youngston gets too good a look, staggers away to throw up. And the sound she makes doing it has Adesso following her after a minute. Descoteaux and Joosten, Brankovič, have hustled off to check on the dogs.

So Clark swallows down the urge to follow Adesso, and takes the opportunity to look around the camp alone.

He's stumbled across a lot of weird things, looking for clues—something that can tell him about himself, about what he is. But this, jesus. If what Clark can do has something to do with this, he'd rather _not_ know.

The expedition had been intending to do some boring in the ice, take some sample cores; they hadn't even reached the main site yet, but judging by the log notes, they'd gone a little off course in the early hours of the storm. They'd decided to stop, wait it out. One of them had gone off ahead, scouting, and the leader—Horowitz, it seemed—had had to go catch up, bring him back. Except he'd been acting strange: raving about a maw in the ice, the darkness, the _eyes_ —

Clark frowns down at the log. The writing gets scratchy, wild, hard to read. Something about what Alvarsson had been carrying, something he'd found. Or—something he'd said? The last thing Clark can make out is just _THE WORDS THE WORDS THE WORDS_ , scribbled hastily across the page, until the letters stop being letters and are just lines, hasty arcs, grotesque angles.

And then the black ink stops being black, and Clark doesn't want to look at the log anymore. Horowitz's blood, or at least he hopes—or—he doesn't know what to hope for, that she'd started clawing at herself or gone after one of the others, none of the options less horrifying than any other. Jesus.

He ducks back out of Horowitz's half-collapsed tent with the log in his hand, and takes a quick look around. A quick look the way only he can look, under and through everything, searching. Because whatever it was Alvarsson brought out of that hole in the ice, it has to be here somewhere. Unless—

He stops and braces himself, and then counts bodies as quickly as he can, not lingering over the twisted shapes of them any more than he has to. Search-and-rescue'd been given basic data on the expedition before they got out here; nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two, and that means no one's missing. If anyone tried to take whatever it was back out across the ice field, they didn't get far. It _has_ to be here.

Clark starts checking again, systematic, sweeping. He sort of half-notices the change in the wind, sweeping in a new direction along the few exposed inches of his cheeks—and then he jerks, wincing, at the sudden deafening chorus of howls.

The dogs. Clark turns to look: Brankovič and Joosten found their harnesses and leads, and started hitching them up. And everything was going fine, until the wind changed.

Again, Clark's neck prickles, and he turns and looks toward what's now the windward side of the camp.

He's expecting to get interrupted, but nobody else comes near him—and maybe they feel it too, just like the dogs; maybe what's only a prickle to Clark is something much more serious to everyone else. There's a body over here, too, and the thing clutched in one of the outflung hands is—

For a second, Clark's distantly terrified that he's about to turn it over and see something familiar. The symbol that's on the outside of the pod under the barn, maybe, or—as little sense as it would make—his own face. But that's not it at all.

He can't even understand what he's seeing, at first. The material doesn't help. It's black, so smooth against Clark's gloved fingertips that it must be polished; but it reflects barely any light at all. Clark has to switch his vision around just to get a decent look at it. And then the figure itself is bizarre, too. A man, crouched—a snarling beast, wings outstretched—both at once, impossibly combined, the shape of the head horribly distorted and the lower limbs twisted, dissolute, a boneless writhing mass.

The figure is poised on a base, a plinth, carved with lines of unfamiliar letters. Words, Clark thinks, in an alphabet he doesn't know. Just looking at them, there's a weird scratchy sensation against the backs of Clark's eyelids, eye sockets. It feels almost like—

Like pain, maybe. Something that would hurt, if Clark weren't whatever he is; something that would claw its way into Clark's head and not come out.

He thinks of Horowitz's log, the frantic scratched-out lines: _THE WORDS THE WORDS THE WORDS_. And suddenly he can't look at the thing for another goddamn second. He screws his eyes shut, grabs it in both hands and _wrenches_ , and whatever it's made out of, it can't stand up to Clark's strength—it cracks, comes apart between his fingers, splinters and crumbles. Even the noise it makes is unsettling, the screech of the material against itself.

And maybe it's just the howl of the wind, the snow; maybe Clark's hearing isn't working quite right. But just as the figure is crushed into unrecognizable fragments in Clark's hands, he thinks he hears—screaming.

Not Youngston, not Adesso, not Joosten. Not anybody on the team, sobbing in fear. Something a lot further away, something maybe no one else could hear at all except Clark. And whatever it is, it's not screaming in terror or grief, but in rage.

 

 

 

**twelve years before alignment.**

Bruce lowers the last of Scarecrow's henchmen to the ground, and then looks up. Scarecrow is still somewhere ahead of him. Bruce shouldn't have much trouble cornering him now, but this warehouse is less a warehouse than it is a set piece: grim, labyrinthine, filled with creeping shadows. Just as Scarecrow wants it.

And Bruce can't deny that the atmosphere in here is—effective. There's something strangely gripping, increasingly intense, about the process of stalking Scarecrow through the dim maze of this lair of his, hunting him down in the dark.

Perhaps some new sort of toxin. Bruce will have to take some blood and tissue samples from himself later, back at the Cave, to see whether it can be isolated.

He pauses for a moment, crouched, to clear his mind; to deliberately set aside the increasingly strong sensation that he's sliding away—that he's less himself than he ought to be, that something else is in his head with him. Because the feeling is irrelevant. He's here for Scarecrow, and almost has him. That's what matters.

If some part of Bruce's mind is being affected by one of Scarecrow's little tricks, then he'll deal with it later. And if he should feel a little too much satisfaction, when he's finally able to sweep down from above and pin Scarecrow to the floor beneath him—if, for a moment, his head is unaccountably full of a dim solid certainty that he could tear Scarecrow apart, that if he only let himself he would _enjoy_ it—

"Oh, look at you," Scarecrow says, sounding nothing but delighted, before he lets out one of his high uneven chuckles.

(What is it about Gotham, Bruce wonders absently, that so many of its villains like to _laugh_ so much?)

"Scarecrow," Bruce acknowledges flatly.

"Look at you. We've always had so much in common, haven't we? Fear surrounds me, and I'm fascinated by it—I can't look away. Even when I want to—" Another gasping laugh. "And I do want to, I do, I do. But I can't look away.

"You understand that. Don't you? You can't look away from it either. Dressing yourself up in it, taking it apart, trying to label every gear and cog. When you've been it all along. You _are_ it. Don't you know that? You're all of it. You're—you're the gate. The gate, and the lock, and the key—"

"What did you say?" Bruce growls.

Hallucinogenic raving, it must be. It's only coincidence, that Scarecrow has stumbled upon something that sounds familiar, that's giving Bruce such sudden and distinct déjà vu. Something that he's heard before, that someone

(—some _thing_ —)

has murmured to him in the middle of the night—

"—to the paths," Scarecrow is muttering, almost dreamily, "the paths that lie in the dark," and then he breaks off, laughs, and this time it escalates unsteadily into hysterical shrieking.

And—ah. There's the empty hypodermic needle Bruce had been expecting, lying on the grimy concrete a few feet away and still spinning lazily.

"What was it? What did you give yourself?" Not that Bruce is expecting an answer, necessarily. But sometimes in the past, even dosed to the gills, Scarecrow has gone through bouts of sudden lucidity.

"You've seen them, you must have seen them. You can't look away. They're waiting for you and you know it—you've seen them, you've seen them watching—their _eyes_ —"

Raving. Coincidence.

Because there's absolutely no way Scarecrow could know about the dreams.

 

Bruce dutifully packs Scarecrow back off to Arkham, and tracks the transport the whole way there just to make sure nothing goes wrong. It's late even for him by the time he returns to the Cave—and then he has to change out of the suit, record his own observations about the evening's work in his logs, add anything of importance to the main set of files concerning Scarecrow and his activities, and so on.

He doesn't transcribe his recollection of Scarecrow's words to the file. There is nothing there of any value.

But he can't get them out of his mind, either.

He's tired, inclined to irrationality. It will pass.

And yet it takes a long time to fall asleep, afterward; and when at last he does, he tumbles immediately into a dark endless place. There is a distant sound, a rustling or hissing or murmuring—many voices, or one so mangled he shudders to picture the throat that speaks with it; shadows, all shadows, except if that were all they were they couldn't _move_ that way, they—they wouldn't have so many eyes—

He wakes on an indrawn breath. He's no longer in his bed, but on his feet—except that's too generous a phrase given the way he's huddled against the wall, the weakness in his knees and the ache in his shoulders. His teeth are clenched, his throat tight, his jaw cramping; he closes his eyes and breathes, counts the slowing beats of his heart, and works his mouth to relaxation by slow degrees.

He's not a boy anymore, not a teenager struggling for control. He no longer cries out loudly enough to bring Alfred running, on nights like these, and he can bandage his own hands.

It's the nails that are the worst this time, he finds when he looks down. Torn, bloody, because he's clawed right through the paint—all four walls are scrawled with jagged shapes, symbols, unreadable; and it's psychosomatic, no doubt, but Bruce's eyes itch and sting, well up hot, just looking at them.

(Like they're clawing back at him. But he didn't get them right, he—he made mistakes, with his closed eyes, his unsteady hands; he has to try again, has to keep trying until they work the way they should, until he looks at them and _bleeds_ —)

Christ. What is wrong with him? What right does he have to sit in judgment and send Scarecrow to Arkham, when he goes home at night and closes his eyes and does _this_? Except—

Except he doesn't hurt anyone. Or hasn't in years, at least. And of course the last thing he should trust is his own assessment, but he doesn't _feel_ insane.

Not for someone who already dresses up like a bat to fight crime, anyway.

He huffs half a laugh against the scarred wall, absent, and then allows his head to tip, presses his forehead to the cool paint.

Maybe there's some other answer; something he hasn't thought of yet. He can't afford to let it lie, not if it's preying on his mind to such a degree that Scarecrow is getting to him. He'll handle it the same way he handles everything: investigate, do some research, figure out what it is he's facing. And if—if he does have to commit himself, in the end—

That's several steps away. First: his hands. The rest can wait until morning.

 

 

 

**seven years before alignment.**

Ruby's always a little relieved when office hours are over. Not that she doesn't enjoy them, at least some of the time, but when she's getting somewhere with her own research, she hates being interrupted.

At 4:00 on the dot, she sighs, pleased to have made it that last and longest half-hour without anybody turning up. She gets up just long enough to refill her coffee and flip the sign on her door—a gift from a TA, styled like something from a '50s soda fountain—from READY TO SERVE to COME BACK LATER; she closes it behind her and she's halfway back to her desk, already thinking ahead to which primary source she wants to tackle next, when someone knocks.

She sighs and rubs her forehead. On the one hand, she shouldn't let anybody get into the habit of missing office hours and then just showing up whenever. But if it's a simple five-minute question—she's not going to send a student packing just because their watch is a little slow.

"Try to get here a little earlier next time," she says, not unkindly, as she opens the door—and then she stops short, because the man outside her office isn't any of her students. "Oh, I—I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else. May I help you?"

"That depends," the man says, with a wry little smile. "Are you Professor Yeung?"

"I am," Ruby agrees, smiling back. "And you are?" Because he's not a student, they're far enough through the semester now that she can recognize even her larger lecture classes pretty well, and yet there's a name that's almost coming to her—

The man's mouth slants a little further, suddenly almost flirtatious. "Bruce Wayne, at your service."

Oh, Ruby thinks, a little faintly. That would do it.

She clears her throat and belatedly takes a step back, swinging the door a little wider. "A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Wayne," she says, and she thinks she mostly manages to approximate the tone of somebody who's never stared absently at Bruce Wayne's bare chest splashed over the tabloids while she waits for her morning bagel at the nearest food cart to campus. "Come in, please. What can I do for you?"

"I'm not interrupting anything, I hope."

Ruby decides, split-second, not to lie. "Nothing urgent," she says, instead of _no_ , and Wayne grins at her brightly.

"Said like someone with much better things to do than talk to me, but I promise I'll try not to take up too much of your time. I'm given to understand you're something of an expert on the life and works of a man named—what was it, Angell?"

"Professor G. G. Angell, yes," Ruby agrees. "The university library here at Miskatonic has the largest collection of primary source material on Angell in the country. And you're ... interested in that?"

She flushes a little after she says it; it wasn't supposed to come out sounding quite that dubious, and she should have known better than to let it. Bruce Wayne isn't exactly known for his intellectual pursuits—but that doesn't mean he can't have any, and he's allowed to be interested in Angell if he wants to be. First rule of working with the less-than-engaged student: find something they _do_ care about and make it relevant. And, Ruby thinks, don't be an elitist snob about it.

But Wayne doesn't seem to take offense. He just keeps smiling. "Don't worry, Professor Yeung, I'm sure I can make this interruption worth your while. Your department can come out of this with a brand-new building, a few extra scholarships to hand out—whatever you like."

Ruby stares at him, disconcerted, because that almost sounded like—

"Mr. Wayne," she says slowly, "I didn't become a teacher because I believe knowledge belongs to the highest bidder. If you'd like to make a donation to the university, that's wonderful; but it has no bearing on this conversation."

And Wayne looks at her with sudden sharpness for a moment, and then says, "Of course. I apologize." And then, with a wink, "I may have been spending a bit too much time in the boardroom lately. But I believe you were telling me about the Angell collection?"

"Yes, of course. To be honest with you, Mr. Wayne, 'largest Angell collection' is a low bar—his grand-nephew destroyed a number of his personal papers, for unknown reasons. But the surviving materials we do have indicate that he'd begun to do some kind of side research into an unusual instance of mass hysteria just before he died. That's how I came across his name, years ago," Ruby adds. "My first thesis project was on mass hysteria, back in the day. Not the kind Angell was looking into, but I ended up reading up on him anyway. I—sorry, sorry, you don't have to keep standing here. Please, feel free to come in and sit down. Coffee?"

"No, no, I'm fine," Wayne says—and it seems to be his answer to both suggestions, because he takes neither a mug nor a seat, even after Ruby's resettled herself behind her desk.

"As you might have guessed, I could go on for hours," Ruby admits, wry, "so perhaps you'd better tell me what exactly it is that you're hoping to find out."

"Oh, nothing much," Wayne says, with an airy wave of his hand. "It's just that I'm something of a collector of—unusual artifacts, you might say. I've been hoping to track down a particular piece I'm interested in, and the only description of it that I've been able to find ended up pointing me toward Angell."

"An artifact," Ruby repeats slowly. "I don't believe we have anything of that sort here, Mr. Wayne. Professor Angell did do groundbreaking work with ancient inscriptions, but he was usually called in to consult—he didn't own many pieces himself."

"Ah," Wayne murmurs, "but he did own some?"

Ruby takes a sip of her coffee and swallows it slowly, looking away, trying to decide what to say.

Because she thinks she knows, now, what Wayne must have stumbled across. It's more closely related than he realizes to that old thesis research she'd done—and it seems ridiculous, here in her brightly-lit office in the late afternoon, to feel the same sense of foreboding that had crept over her then: alone in a dark library, after hours, reading those fragmentary passages and feeling the hairs on the back of her neck all stand up at once—

And yet she does.

"A bas-relief," she tells her coffee, without looking up. "With an inscription, and a figure. Is that what you're looking for, Mr. Wayne?"

"So you do know something about it," Wayne says, with a boyish sort of satisfaction.

"Enough to give you a little free advice: don't find it."

A frown flickers across that charming, sunny face, utterly out of place. "What? What's that supposed to mean?"

And Ruby does look at him, then, and almost pities him. What a pleasant life it is he seems to lead—if the stress of repeated scandal bothers him, he doesn't show it, and he has more money and more time than he knows what to do with. Which is to say he does know what to do with some of it; Ruby's relied on Wayne Enterprises grant money herself, in the past.

But he still has enough on his hands to end up poking around in places he shouldn't, and he doesn't even know it. He doesn't even realize what he might find.

"You're going to think I'm nuts," Ruby says at last.

"Oh, I'd never dare entertain such notions about a lady—"

"No, it's all right," Ruby says, tone level, letting Wayne's warm flirtatious delivery go unremarked. "I'm just saying it so you know I understand how this is going to come across. You're going to think I'm nuts. It's fine. Sometimes _I_ think I'm nuts.

"But you won't understand what I mean if I don't give you a little context, and when I give you the context, it's going to sound pretty ridiculous."

Wayne looks at her for a long moment. All at once he isn't smiling quite so widely; and his gaze is steady, unblinking. "Try me," he says, and now, at last, he does take a step closer to the desk and seat himself in the chair across from her.

"I'm a sociologist, Mr. Wayne," Ruby says. "'Mass hysteria' is a term that can be used to refer to multiple kinds of phenomena—to medical symptoms spontaneously manifesting in social groups with no clear explanation, to a collective conviction regarding an imminent threat of which there is no actual evidence. The incidents Professor Angell was investigating were, in a sense, both. Which wasn't particularly helpful to me, given the focus of my thesis," she adds, wry, "but it did make for interesting reading."

Wayne's eyebrows are climbing, his expression bemused. "And this—has to do with the Angell bas-relief how, exactly?"

"Nuts," Ruby repeats firmly. "It's okay. You can think it. I won't hold it against you."

"So you've said," Wayne says, a flicker of a smile returning to one corner of his mouth.

"The bas-relief was made for him. It was—and this is how all the primary sources I've ever found describe it, it isn't my own interpretation—it was a dream. They dreamed it."

Ruby's only tried to explain this to three or four people before, and she rarely gets far; this is almost always the point at which they start to grin, to laugh, to jab her with an elbow and tell her she almost had them. Or to urge her to keep going, because they want to know how this ghost story of hers is going to end. And she's not expecting anything different from Wayne.

But the instant, the very _instant_ , she says the word _dream_ , the color drains all at once from Wayne's face. The color, the expression; all his amusement, the idly intrigued look in his eyes, the easy slant to his mouth.

"Mr. Wayne?"

"They," he repeats, very levelly.

"I—there were—dozens of them," Ruby says automatically. "All over the world. As I said, many of Angell's personal papers were apparently hidden or destroyed after his death, by a grand-nephew who also died only a little while later. At the time I was looking into Angell myself, I managed to turn up some newspaper pieces from around the same time. I'm a fair hand with a microfiche reader."

She offers Wayne a tentative half-smile, and after a moment he returns it—but absently, still staring at her, and so terribly pale she almost wants to ask him whether he needs to lie down for a minute.

But he doesn't tell her to stop. "Reports of symptoms varied. Some people had just experienced intense unease, generalized distress. Those who could recall imagery described basic elements to the dream that appeared to have been shared. Which is what caught my attention at the time. The geographical spread was—in the past, mass hysteria has been confined, localized. People talk to each other, even see each other affected directly, and incidents take on a common profile. It makes sense. But Angell's case, it—it was different.

"And there were a few individuals Angell was interested in who seemed to have been—well. I'd say particularly drastically affected, but I think he'd have said particularly sensitive. One of them was responsible for the bas-relief."

"I see," Wayne says softly. "And you think this means I should put my little quest aside because?"

"Because I've seen it, Mr. Wayne," Ruby tells him. "A sketch, that's all, but I—"

"Where?" Wayne says, suddenly intent, animated. "Who drew it?"

Ruby draws a long slow breath and lets it out, curls her hand a little more tightly around her coffee cup, and says, "I did."

"You did," Wayne repeats, after a moment.

Ruby closes her eyes. Years, it's been years; and yet it's still right there in her mind if she reaches for it, near enough to touch. She shivers, distantly grateful for the heat of the coffee mug against her fingers. "Yes. I was—I read everything I could get my hands on. I couldn't stop. It was barely relevant to my thesis, I didn't need any of it. But I couldn't stop.

"I spent all day, all night, looking for more, for even the barest detail I might have missed. And then I fell asleep in the library, and I—"

She cuts herself off without quite meaning to, shaking her head—but what can she say? How can she describe it in a way that will capture it for Wayne, that will make him understand? Waking like that, upright, already gasping; every single page in her notebook torn out, scattered around her, and all of them covered, _covered_ in it. Scrawled in every color of pen she'd had with her until the pens had all emptied, and then just scratched, torn into the paper, with the dry points. The pain in her eyes, in her mouth—the blood on her tongue—

But when she looks up, Wayne is looking back at her like he already understands.

"It wasn't time," she hears herself whisper. "You know that, don't you? With Angell, it was—the stars weren't right. They could reach, even touch, but the stars weren't right. They can't do it alone. They need a gate, a key—"

Wayne reaches across the desk, wraps his hands around Ruby's before she can break the mug; she almost does anyway, she's shaking so hard.

"—the depthless shadows, the sealed tower—"

—what the hell is she _doing_? It's all nonsense, rambling words that don't add up to anything, but she can't stop saying them. She _can't_.

"—the son of the bat," she gasps out, throat aching, and watches Bruce Wayne's eyes go wide.

 

 

 

**PART TWO: PARALLAX**

 

**four years before alignment.**

"Artificial population control was established, and—"

The projection of Jor-El pauses, suddenly enough that Clark almost thinks it's some kind of problem with the system. But then he looks at Clark, and his face is so grave, so serious, that Clark's gut sinks with foreboding.

"What happened?" Clark says, even though he's not sure he wants to hear the answer.

"It was the beginning of the end," Jor-El says quietly. "A danger we were not able to perceive—so great, so vast and ancient, that even if we had perceived it, I doubt we could have fully understood it.

"All civilizations in this universe stand forever poised upon a knife's edge, Kal; there are powers, entities, to whom all our endless striving, all that we are and all that we aspire to and all that we build, is but a spark in the long eternal night—a vague brief flare of delusion, against a tide of darkness it cannot hope to illuminate. Their influence is everywhere. It seeps through the cracks, the corners, the quiet places. We cannot escape it; we can only hope to remain ignorant of it for a while, live unknowing and die before we have begun to appreciate the extent of that ignorance."

And behind Jor-El, the scene is changing—just a bit at a time, at first, and then faster, faster. The ship had constructed figures, a landscape, ships overhead, to illustrate Jor-El's words as he spoke, and all of it had been clean and well-formed, beautiful; but now there's—there's something creeping across the landscape, some dark mass or shadow encroaching, and a suggestion of tendrils or tentacles writhing along the edges in a way that makes Clark vaguely nauseated. The faces of the figures, too, have changed, and Clark can't even work out exactly what it is that's different; but their eyes seem suddenly empty, their gazes blank and lifeless, the form and appearance of a person without anything inside.

Which he can tell, he realizes abruptly, because they've all turned toward him. They're—they're _looking_ at him, out of the ship's display, all those dull stares trained on him—

"Indeed," Jor-El says, and Clark jerks in startlement. Jesus, he'd half-forgotten Jor-El was even there. He swallows hard and tears his eyes away from the figures in the sculpture-mural, and meets Jor-El's understanding gaze.

"You were—you changed," Clark manages.

"Yes. It was gradual. Almost unnoticeable, at first. But the Codex that governed the creation of new individuals was flawed—infected. Our society, our entire world, was corrupted by it, and by the time those of us who were least affected had realized the degree of the calamity, it was too late.

"Krypton had been consumed. There was—" and for the first time the projection himself looks uncertain; he's spoken so calmly, so eloquently, ever since Clark activated him, but for this there seem to be no words. "There was something within the planet, Kal, I—I cannot begin to describe it to you. And we had let it in, we had _invited_ it. When I went to the Council to reveal what I had discovered, what our own people had summoned into being, they looked at me and smiled, and spoke its name, and the voice with which they spoke was not their own."

"And am—am I—?"

"No," Jor-El says instantly. "No, Kal. You are safe. You were conceived without the use of the Codex, outside of its reach. Your mother and I had felt its touch ourselves, but we were able to discover how to isolate the effects—none were passed on to you. You are what we all once were, what we were meant to be: free."

"And Krypton," Clark says, uneven. Because he—he thinks he already knows what Jor-El will say; something about the projection's expression, his tone, the bewildered regretful horror with which he'd spoken of the Council—

"I destroyed it." Jor-El's tone is quiet but unflinching. "There was nothing left of the world I had loved and called my home. The thing that crouched within it yet slept, for the great revolving cycle of the cosmos had not yet reached the appointed arrangement. And if I could not kill it, I knew I might at least send it back to the pit it had crawled from, and fill the way of its return with barriers."

And behind him, the view has suddenly stepped backward, away from the crowd of figures and their empty eyes—backward and then up, out, the perspective widening to encompass a planet. But the surface looks strange, uneven, the ground riddled with cracks and vast sinkholes. And it doesn't explode the way Clark was expecting. It falls _in_ on itself instead, crumbling away to nothing; and as it does, there's some sort of faint sound. Just on the edge of Clark's hearing: as if something somewhere is screaming in—in rage—

Clark swallows, and realizes all at once that he's absently pressed his hands together, clenched up his fingers, as if to crush something between them.

"I found something once," he says to Jor-El, slowly. "It was—I don't know how to describe it."

"The ship can recreate it for you," Jor-El says, so Clark kneels down right there in the middle of the floor, sets his palm against the deck and thinks about the carved figurine, pictures it as clearly as he can bear to.

The ship seems almost hesitant, too: when Clark looks up, the model it's made is fuzzy-edged, out of focus, spare chips of tessellated metal hovering uncertainly around it. And Jor-El is staring at it with a grim dismay that makes Clark immediately sure he was right to bring it up.

"You said 'not yet'," Clark says, after a moment. "That the—cycle of the cosmos hadn't progressed to the right point."

"I did," Jor-El agrees.

"But it will, won't it?"

Jor-El looks at him and then away, and reaches out toward the model—which, of course, obediently floats toward him. He stands there looking at it for a moment longer, mouth twisting with sudden revulsion, and ghosts a fingertip along the shifting face of it, the grotesque curves and angles of that terrible half-bestial figure.

Not that he can touch it, Clark reminds himself. Probably just a way for the projection to run a scan of some kind.

"It will," Jor-El says at last, very low. "There is still time, Kal. But you must be ready, and there is a great deal you do not know. This—" and he indicates the model with a sharp gesture of his hand. "—is a figure of legend, of myth immemorial. Reborn, from cycle to cycle, guided by the touch you were spared from. A man like any other, to all appearances, and yet within him lies the power to unleash the end of everything.

"You did not come to this world by chance. Your mother and I sent you here for a reason: all my research indicated that this planet would be the next great point of weakness, after Krypton. And if you are to save it, and the universe with it, you must find this man—"

"No," Clark says, suddenly sure he knows where this is going. "No, Jor-El—Father—"

"—and you must kill him," Jor-El says, inexorable. "Kal, I do not say this lightly. He may not even know what he is. And yet for the sake of all that is, of life itself, you cannot allow the gates to be opened; and to all gates there is a key. Find the key, destroy it, and the way is shut."

Clark swallows hard. He can't do it. He _can't_. But—

But for the sake of everyone on Earth, maybe. Maybe he could, if he had to. If there were no other choice.

(Funny, almost. That he'd found this ship and he'd been glad; that he'd wanted to learn more about himself. But that he might choose to kill someone—deliberately, intentionally, and not for anything they'd done but for what they could do, what they _were_ —

That's not a part of himself he'd wanted to discover.)

"I'll have to find him first," he says aloud. "Even if I can—do what you're asking, I'll have to find him first. Tell me how."

 

 

 

**three years before alignment.**

Arthur had been the most difficult to find; Victor, the most difficult to convince. Barry, by contrast, had been easy to locate and had hardly needed convincing at all. And Diana had walked right up to him and made it clear that it wouldn't be a matter of _convincing_ —that either she would agree or she would not, and it would be entirely on her own terms.

Four. That might be enough.

Bruce bites the inside of his cheek and sets all five simulations to run themselves through another ten thousand iterations, ignoring a bright burst of laughter from somewhere upstairs. He needs to be _sure_.

Four is good, certainly; that simulation ends in successful outcomes more than twice as often as any other. A vast improvement over any simulation with only three, even considering the sheer number of unknowns. Though groups of three that include Diana do better than groups of three without. He's still trying to tease out the factors involved there, which exactly of his chosen weights and variables are responsible for the difference. Something about the lasso, perhaps; difficult to draw conclusions when the circumstances are still so hypothetical, when there's no good way to test its effectiveness against its final-stage opponent until that final-stage opponent has been made manifest. In any case: three has potential, four is an improvement. But five—

Five would be even better, surely. He has no way to meaningfully assess the capabilities of a Green Lantern, except through Diana's second-hand stories from her mother; and wild estimates are hardly anything he feels comfortable betting the fate of the universe on. But the greater the number—and the more variability in the weapons and powers available to them—the better. And if they're a team, if they understand how to work together to the group's overall advantage, that will only strengthen them.

Four might be enough. But five would be better.

Not that he can be certain the Green Lanterns even still exist; not that he has any way to contact them, if they do. But all the research Bruce has conducted since that meeting with Professor Yeung has pointed him in the same direction: a cataclysm is approaching, and one of a magnitude that will surely be sufficient to draw the Lanterns' attention.

He can't depend on it, at this point. But it's not out of the question—

"Enjoying yourself?"

Diana's tone is dry, but unaccountably warm. Bruce glances up, past the screens and their rapid-fire tallies of results (two thousand iterations run, eight thousand to go), and meets her eyes; and, as always, it takes a moment for him to grapple with the sensation that she is—looking through him, or into him, seeing something no one else can see.

Improbable. The Scarecrow had been raving, drugged, on the edge of sanity. Even Professor Yeung, in the moment she had most clearly lost control of herself, hadn't seemed to be aware of his nature. In all likelihood, Diana has no idea what she's looking at.

If only there were any reason to believe she would never need to find out.

"Always," Bruce says aloud, equally dry, and the corners of Diana's mouth twitch.

"Yes, I can imagine there's much to be gained by refusing to join us upstairs, in order to run—" Diana tilts her head at the bank of monitors consideringly. "—tactical simulations, three and a half thousand times. Which no doubt require your oversight?"

She looks at him, and then, pointedly, back and forth between his hands and the keyboard, the distance between them.

The simulations don't need any further input from him, it's true. He's just waiting on the results.

"It's important," he says, looking away.

He means it on multiple levels. The simulations are important, the results are important—not only in and of themselves, but in that he keeps running them in the former case and pressing for improvements in the latter. In that he's able to prove to himself that no power or influence has reached out to prevent it, that he has felt neither compelled to put them aside nor simply lost his sense of purpose, woken up one day and discovered that he could no longer remember why it had mattered to him. Not that that isn't cause for doubt all its own

(—might it mean that all his plans will come to nothing? That his efforts to affect this outcome will be wasted? Or, worse, that he is _advancing_ ends he cannot understand in ways he doesn't realize, that all he's doing is making it worse—)

but Bruce has been subsisting on cold comforts and silver linings for a very long time, and he knows how to ration them, how to make them last.

(Important, too, that he should stay where he is. Social connection, cohesion, can be powerful factors; the stronger the bonds between the League's members, the better. And as long as Bruce remains a step away, a mentor or a colleague but not, at heart, a friend—

It will be easier for them, that way, when the time arrives at last. The simulations where they hesitate, where they look for other solutions besides the most obvious, always end with—

They can't hesitate. There can't be anything holding them back, at the critical moment. The less attached they feel to Bruce as an individual, the better.)

"Important," Diana repeats slowly.

Bruce glances at her; she's looking at the monitors more carefully now, searchingly, and then at him, with the barest furrow creasing her brow.

"This is why you found us, why you brought us together. Whatever scenario you're simulating—it's about us, isn't it?"

Bruce looks away again. He can't tell her the truth; he hardly knows it himself, when there's still so much he doesn't understand, so much research left to do. He can't tell her much of anything

(—he doesn't _want_ to, he—since the day they met, eyes narrowing at each other over flutes of champagne, three-piece suit and evening gown and careful smiles, Diana has been unmistakably kind to him. There's no other word for it. Listening to him, when she might as easily have thrown her drink in his face and walked away; trusting him, when she had no reason to. Fighting at his shoulder, placidly and patiently ignoring him when he'd told her there was no need, that he worked alone—

And it's not that he'll ever deserve it. It's only that he—he doesn't want her to know what she's wasted that kindness on, not until she has to—)

but at least he can give her a warning. It's the least of what he owes her, by now.

"There's something coming," he says aloud, quietly. "I don't know exactly what and I don't know exactly when, but it's out there. The world is in danger, Diana, and you need to be ready."

She doesn't object to the dearth of detail, specificity—but then Bruce has learned a little bit about where she's from, and she's probably used to dire and unhelpfully vague prophecy.

She just steps forward, lays a hand on his shoulder and squeezes, her grip warm and reassuring and strong. "We will be," she says. "Bruce—whatever it is, we will face it together."

Ah. He slipped: he should have said _we_ too, instead of _you_.

But he finds he can't quite bring himself to.

(Diana doesn't have the lasso with her all the time. But it's never particularly easy, Bruce has discovered, to lie to her.)

"I hope so," he says instead, and Diana offers him a steady grave smile, and doesn't let go.

(She's always been so kind to him. But then she doesn't know what she's looking at.

Not yet.)

 

 

 

**two years before alignment.**

High above the bay, Clark hovers over the wide stretch of dark water, closes his eyes, and listens.

There's a certain irony in it, that he should have zigzagged halfway across the world and back, following every hint Jor-El and the ship could turn up, and it had all only served to lead him straight to the Metropolis-Gotham metro area. A hop, skip, and a jump from Kansas, at least for Clark.

And a certain irony, too, that he should have delved so deep, traveled so far, and tracked down dozens of leads that had unceremoniously fizzled out on him, only to come to Gotham and trip across the Bat.

The first time he'd heard a Gotham Bat story, he'd known it for what it was. The prickle that had climbed along the back of his neck had told him as much. Years of work deciphering ancient texts with the ship's help, cross-referencing secret prophecies and cracking rock apart with his bare hands to get to hidden artifacts, and the only thing he'd ever really needed was the memory of that carved figure: something that wasn't quite a man, crouched and snarling, a bat's wings half-spread over him.

But the Gotham Batman isn't the only thing Clark has to worry about.

He'd thought when he'd first arrived in Metropolis that his best chance to narrow down his search would be to look for the sort of activity that he'd learned was relevant to this kind of thing: gatherings in dark places, screams and chants and incomprehensible words coming from somewhere underground, some secret depth where no one but Clark could hear it. He didn't like it, it made his head ache to listen; but it was certainly efficient.

Except, of course, he had to wait for it to happen. It isn't as though there's a schedule to it, or at least none Clark's been able to determine. So he'd put himself to work just talking to people, listening—and then, once he'd learned about the Gotham Bat, asking. Following up, while he waited, because he did know what he was waiting for. There are days that feel different: strange, a heaviness in the air, a particular dimness to the overcast sky, a feeling of being watched. Days like today.

And at last, this afternoon, it happened. Clark had been grimly relieved to at least have an end to the waiting, and only then had he noticed there was something more to it, this time. Something strange, in the voices—multiplying, layered over one another, more voices than there had been throats for them to belong to. The whisper of a scent on the air, suddenly, and so noxious Clark had flinched from it and coughed, helpless.

And now he's up in the air over the bay, listening, and he can hear it better still, the thing that had caught his attention: a low cracking sound, the faint deep groan of straining rock.

(—uneven, the ground riddled with cracks and vast sinkholes—falling _in_ on itself, crumbling away to nothing—)

And he knows, he _knows_ , that every calculation the ship has run says he should still have years. But he feels a cold clenching in his chest anyway. Because the Batman is here, or something like him; and this, whatever this is—the ship could be wrong. Couldn't it? And if catastrophe has come early

(— _you must kill him_ —)

and Clark is too slow to—to do what he's—

He opens his eyes. Whatever it is, whatever is happening, it's happening just beneath a park in the middle of Metropolis. And Clark can't stop it from here.

 

For a moment, he thinks it's his own imagination. The sky is strange, above the park—it was already an overcast day, but the clouds directly overhead are thick, black, roiling with unusual speed. The lighting is strange, too, casting peculiar shadows; and surely there isn't actually a figure crouched upon the edge of one particular rooftop. Clark must be wrong, to think he's seeing the curving stretch of long dark wings.

But his trajectory's already changed, his breath catching in his throat, and in the space of a blink he's there—

A head, turning; but there's something wrong with it, Clark thinks distantly. The shape is—that _can't_ be right, he tells himself, but his heart is pounding anyway.

For a single moment that seems unaccountably endless, he can't see anything but the carved figure from the ice, brought to life. The crouch, on a roofline instead of a plinth; the misshapen head, the black and staring eyes; the spread wings, and the impossible roiling mass of—

No: it's a cape. Snapping back at the shoulders, in the grip of the rising wind, and then trailing, swirling—it had disguised the man's legs, for an instant. But Clark can see the booted feet, now, bent knees and broad, muscled thighs.

A man in a cape and a cowl.

Or at least that's what he looks like now, Clark reminds himself. Perched over the park like this, with something coming awake somewhere down there—Clark has just as much cause for suspicion as he ever did.

"You're the Batman," he says aloud.

"Yes," growls the figure.

"Stop this."

The Batman regards Clark silently, and doesn't move.

"Whatever this is, whatever they're doing," because Clark can hear it more clearly still, some of the voices wavering off into weird ecstatic cries, reverberating against stone, and the drip of something he's suddenly sure is blood; and beneath it all, the low wet grating scrape of movement, some vast body shifting. "It's not too late," he adds, though for all he knows it might be. "Just stop this."

"Who are you?"

As if that matters at all, right now. Clark crosses the distance between them in a burst of frustration, grabs the Batman by one arm—and the Batman tenses, jerks away, but Clark modulates his grip to just beyond the point where the Batman might pull free. "Why are you doing this? You must know what'll happen if you—"

"I'm not," the Batman grits out. This close, Clark can see through the eyeholes in the cowl, and beyond it isn't just black nothingness. It's—they're—eyes. Wide, a little searching, steady on Clark's face.

(— _he may not even know what he is_ —but he must, right? Dressing up like this, being here right now, when whatever's happening down there is happening. This man can't possibly not know—)

"In position," says someone else—or, no, Clark thinks, they're alone on the rooftop; but the man has some kind of communicator, a channel open.

"No sign of Luthor here," says yet another voice, low and frustrated.

"You—what are you doing?" Clark says belatedly.

"That's none of your concern," the Batman bites out, unflinching, even though Clark is still gripping his arm so tightly it has to hurt.

And then there's a sound, a rush of air—Clark thinks at first it's just the clouds, that strange wind, intensifying further, but it resolves itself into movement and ends with the gentle contact of boot-soles against stone.

He turns, blinking, to look at the armored woman who's just leapt all thirty stories below them to reach the rooftop.

"Making friends?" she murmurs—and Clark can hear the words in stereo, from her mouth in front of him and from the Batman's communicator.

Another crack, and this one is so loud that the woman and the Batman can both hear it; all three of them turn, reflexive, to glance down into the park at the jagged dark line that's suddenly splintering through half a dozen of the park's stone-paved walkways.

"There's no time for this," the woman says, and she strides along the roof's edge without a moment's pause to grip Clark's shoulder.

She's—strong.

"Whatever it is that has been invited through that doorway, it must not get free. It _must_ not. Help us stop it."

"Diana—"

She ignores the Batman, keeps her gaze fixed on Clark. "Help us," she says again.

Clark hesitates. Which is the last thing he ought to be doing, at a moment like this. Surely it would be smarter to just throw the Batman off the building right now and not look back. But he—

He's always wanted to help so much more than he wants to hurt.

And then it stops mattering, because all at once there's a terrible sharp noise, so deep Clark's chest vibrates with it and so loud that all three of them flinch with the impact of it. Clark twists to look down at the park, and the ground has split open entirely now; even as he watches, some vast dark _thing_ is oozing-spilling-crawling free of it—or is that just one limb of something larger still?

If the Batman and this woman—Diana—are going to be fighting _that_ , they could definitely use his help. And what good would it do to kill the Batman but let that thing get out?

"Okay," Clark tells Diana, "all right. I'll—I'll help you."

"Settle for not getting in our way," the Batman snaps, and then he jerks himself free of Clark's hand and leaps from the edge of the roof himself.

 

The thing that claws its way out of the ground in the park is almost indescribable, a dark misshapen bulk of deformed limbs and grasping feelers, squelching and writhing and creeping, with far, far too many eyes.

But Diana wields a flashing sword whose blows make the thing shriek and shudder, and a blazing lasso that chases all the crawling shadows away with bright red-gold light. And there are others, too, besides her and the Batman: a man in some kind of brilliant silver armor, another with a trident, and what Clark thinks is a stray flash of lightning until he speeds himself up enough to catch a glimpse of the man inside it.

And they work together like they know each other, like a team—or at least the beginnings of one. At first Clark almost thinks the Bat was right, that maybe all he needs to do is stay out of their way. But surely it won't hurt anything for Clark to freeze a few oozing tendrils with his breath before they can creep around behind the man in the silver armor. Or to laser a few of the closest wet staring eyes into cauterized pulp—

"Man, how many powers do you have?" yells the man who runs in lightning, streaking past.

And Clark can't quite match his pace—or at least not without flattening a few trees; how does this guy run so fast without frying himself on his own friction? But he can get close enough for a stride or two, which is long enough to watch the guy's eyes widen, to smile and say, "Couple more!"

He comes around after another moment, uses up the rest of his excess velocity in a swing up into the air; and it's right then, slowing and turning to survey what's left of the park from above, that Clark realizes he's lost track of the Batman.

Even as he searches, scans with his vision and opens up his hearing, a part of him is thinking of Jor-El's face, of what he came here to do: _within him lies the power to unleash the end of everything_ , and—and what if the Bat has tricked Diana and the others into trusting him, into bringing him here, claiming that it would be to fight this thing when he intended nothing of the sort? But when Clark catches a sound he can't account for, it isn't Batman's low distorted growl chanting its way through some second ritual. It's—ticking.

And _then_ the growl: "Just a little longer."

Clark can see Diana frown from here. "Bruce—"

"A little longer," the Bat repeats, flat and stern, and then, at last, Clark catches sight of him. Grappling with one fat dark tentacle, but three more are clawing their way across the ground toward him, and in another moment they have him. Half a dozen of the nearest eyes swivel in bloated unison to fix on Batman's struggling figure, and he's hauled up into the air, dangling.

Dangling, and ticking.

Clark's halfway to the Bat, wind screaming in his ears, before he realizes all at once what that means. And Batman clearly doesn't think he has, because he sees Clark and snaps, "Don't—"

"No, I—"

Tick, tick, tick, and Clark can _hear_ the sound changing somehow, can almost feel it; he stops trying to explain himself, just grabs for Batman's arm and peels one clinging tentacle away, and—yes, there it is, not on Batman anymore but slung around the next tentacle over, squeezed between soft looping coils. Clark pulls harder, jerks Batman loose and turns them in the air, and he's between Batman and the thing when the first round of explosives detonates.

It's a wave of heat against Clark's back, heat and pressure, and he's had some practice figuring out what range of temperatures won't do humans damage—this isn't it. How the hell was Batman planning to survive that? Jesus.

The thing underneath them _screams_ , the noise so gratingly unbearable that even the Batman tenses in a flinch against Clark's arms—and Clark can smell wet iron, in a sudden burst; probably at least one of Batman's ears, bleeding. He risks a quick glance behind and below, and the strip of explosives he'd seen does appear to have done its job: those grasping, indistinct feelers that had been wrapped around Batman have been torn apart, the peeling remains of them shuddering and contracting as if in pain.

But it's hardly enough to do any real damage, is it?

And then the Bat rasps out, "Get us higher. Now."

What are the odds he's going to answer any question Clark asks him right now? Probably not good. "Okay," Clark says instead. "Hang on," and he adjusts his grip on Batman's body armor and then darts upward: another hundred feet, two hundred, three—

The second explosion shakes the whole park, and this blast brings with it not just light, not just fire, but a strange shockwave of something else Clark's never felt before. There's an instant of perfect silence, sudden darkness that's almost physical, material, coming apart and passing them—and then it's gone, and Clark hangs on to Batman through the sudden hot pressure at their feet, and looks down to nothing but fire and rubble.

"What—it—it's gone," he murmurs.

Because it is. There's still a lot of blackness, that huge ragged crack tearing across almost the whole width of the park, scorched and toppled stone and smoking wreckage. But the thing, the whole twisting squirming mass of it, seems to have melted away.

"Couldn't hold together," Batman evaluates, absent, staring down at it himself; and then he looks at Clark and adds flatly, "Put me down."

 

By the time they reach the ground, someone else is there already: another man, held between the man in silver armor and the man with the trident. Almost as though they expect him to struggle, but he isn't. He's just standing there, in a suit and no tie, streaked with blood and grime, staring at the ruin of the park with an odd, intent gaze.

Or—he _is_ bloody, grimy, but that's not all of it, Clark realizes. There's something written on him. On his hands, his neck; scratched in, and not ink but scars, dark and almost pulsing.

"Well, huh," he says. "Did you see that?"

"Oh, we saw it, Mr. Luthor," the man in the armor says, dry.

"That wasn't how it was supposed to go," Luthor tells him, almost conversational. "That wasn't right at all. The book said it would listen to me. That if I followed all the steps, if I said all the words, it would listen to me. It would _have_ to." He tilts his head, quick and a little unsettling, too-sharp eyes still roving across the park in front of him. "Everything else the book said was true. I knew it all along: the devils come from the sky, you see? It's the gods who are beneath—who wait dreaming—"

"Their servant, and hardly that," Batman says, as if what Luthor's said makes sense to him. They're low enough now that he can push away from Clark, drop to the wrecked pavement in a crouch and then stand, and he does it and doesn't look back.

Clark lands at his shoulder anyway.

"That wasn't how it was supposed to go," Luthor murmurs again; but it seems to be less a reply to Batman's words and more simply an observation he's making to himself, with the thoughtful and half-distracted air of a scientist.

"Too bad," says the guy with the trident, blunt false sympathy.

"And everyone is all right?" says Diana, stepping forward. "Barry—no civilian casualties?"

"Cleared the area with time to spare," says Barry—the lightning guy—promptly. "And, uh, not that I'm complaining or anything, but: who brought this dude? Can we keep him?"

"I believe he brought himself," Diana murmurs.

"Oh—me?" Clark says belatedly, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck.

He glances at Diana, at Barry, and then quickly at the Bat and away again. He still isn't sure exactly what's going on here, whether the Batman had anything to do with all this or not.

But the best way to find out probably isn't to try to kill the guy right here, in front of half a dozen of his teammates. And—

And after all the years he's spent alone, following this trail with only the ship and his biological father's ghost for company, it felt good to work _with_ someone. This team, these people, they know something—maybe more than Clark does, and the more he can learn from them, the better-prepared he'll be. The better-prepared they'll all be.

(And if worst comes to worst—maybe they'd help him. Maybe they don't know what the Bat is either; maybe once they did, they'd be willing to help Clark figure out what to do about it.)

"We don't wish to inconvenience you," Diana is saying, carefully diplomatic. "Barry only means that if you aren't needed elsewhere—"

"Oh, come on, he just spent the better part of an hour beating up an eldritch abomination in the park!" Barry says. "He totally has the time to come have dinner with us. Right?"

"I—sure," Clark says, and when Barry smiles at him, it's almost impossible not to smile back.

The sky over them is clearing a little, the clouds no longer stacked on top of each other so heavily, a little sunlight breaking through here and there. Diana's wearing a small, pleased smile, and—

And he's got two years, he reminds himself. Doing this, agreeing to work with them—it isn't necessarily under false pretenses. Maybe the Gotham Batman _isn't_ who Clark's been looking for at all, a red herring; and if he is, there's—there's still two years. That's what the ship said.

So he holds out his hand to Diana, says, "Clark. I'm—I'm Clark," and ignores the cold squirming feeling of guilt clawing through his gut.

 

 

 

**one year before alignment.**

There's a certain irony to it: Bruce is standing in the Hall of Justice and thinking about margins of error, failures, weakness. And when he hears a scuff of feet and looks up, who should it be but Clark?

He looks away. "You should be sleeping."

In his peripheral vision, he can see Clark's one-shouldered shrug. "I don't need sleep," Clark says, "I need sunshine. Fifteen minutes, tops. I'll be fine."

Bruce aims another sharp glance at him, and then down, pointedly, to his hands—which are trembling just a little at his sides.

"It wasn't that much kryptonite," Clark insists. "I'm feeling a lot better."

Margins of error; failures. Weakness.

At first, Bruce had thought Clark was the perfect solution. Superstrength to rival Diana's; superspeed that approached Barry's, though it almost certainly couldn't exceed it; an ability to withstand damage that rivaled Victor's armor and Arthur's deep-sea durability. Bruce's simulation results had begun to tip toward success more often than not.

But Clark does have at least one flaw. Bruce has been able to compensate for the potential problems this causes, to some degree; kryptonite encountered by the League is always handed over to Diana, who agreed from the start not to tell Bruce what she does with it. If none is available at the moment when it matters most, surely that should be good enough.

Still, he's tempered his calculations' sudden tendency toward optimism. Better to be prepared for the worst possible outcome than to expect the best and be taken cruelly by surprise.

But there are other kinds of weakness. Bruce should have realized there was a risk the moment they had met, the moment Clark had given up the advantage and let him go—the moment Clark had come for him, when he'd been entangled in the relentless oozing grasp of that thing in the park.

(It had been so difficult to hold still within the grip of it. The way it had clung and pressed, the strange soft texture of it—like waterlogged flesh, a thing that shouldn't have been alive but was, shouldn't have moved that way but did. It had been vile, terrible, and for an instant Bruce had wanted nothing so much as to thrash and scream and rip it away from himself. It could have his arm, his legs, his _mind_ , if only it never ever touched him again—

But he'd had to let it take him, and he had. He'd let it haul him into the air: over itself, over the greatest bulk of its mass, right where the second set of explosives would need to drop after this batch of arms had been severed by the first set. The pulsing awfulness of its touch was nothing, he'd told himself; vague nightmare, and he knew how to bear nightmares. The clench of his hand around his utility belt, the ache in his knuckles—those were real. A mundane and even comforting sort of pain, compared to what it felt like to be touched by that thing.

But he couldn't have stood it much longer. He'd felt himself coming apart, as if from a distance. Enough, enough; he'd managed to keep from yelling it aloud, but he hadn't been able to stop thinking it, had filled his head with the words: enough, _enough_ , ENOUGH.

And then Clark had come for him. He hadn't known Clark's name yet, and even if he had, in that moment he probably wouldn't have been able to say it or remember it. But Clark had come for him, had touched him with one warm strong hand and hadn't let go, and all at once everything had been easier. It had been easier to think, to breathe; to feel the cord that linked the first set of explosives between his fingers and remember why it was there, to sling it into position the way he'd planned.

He shouldn't have let himself be so glad about it.

Because he has thought about it—of course he has. It would have been efficient, that's all. To kill the thing and solve a second problem; to fall and be swallowed by the blast, no one else close enough to stop it.

Except if Clark hadn't been there, perhaps Diana would have leapt for him instead. Barry might have run, might have climbed the thing and grabbed Bruce out of the air and kept going, too fast for even an explosion to catch up. And even if Bruce had died in that explosion—

Who's to say something else wouldn't have walked out of it?

No guarantees. Always, always, margins of error.)

And the way Clark had acted afterward, too, so ready to grin back at Barry, to introduce himself to Diana. It was true that he'd been a little—strange, reserved, around Bruce to start with. And of course Bruce had done everything in his power to encourage that response; it had been the only logical course of action.

But Clark makes friends almost literally by accident: without intent or ulterior motive, without thought or guidance, and at what anyone else might consider dangerously high speeds. Impossible to keep him at a distance, considering the kind of ground he can cover in a single bound.

Another failure.

Bruce looks up, and Clark is watching him—only for a moment, and then Clark's gaze flicks to the suit, the cowl, in front of Bruce. Still neatly stowed away; there's no emergencies tonight, at least for the moment. Bruce came down to the equipment room just to look at them. That's all.

(The way the light falls, the way Bruce is reflected in the transparent front of the uniform case—it's almost like the cowl is looking back at him, for an instant or two at a time.)

"You okay?" Clark ventures, soft.

"Fine," Bruce says.

Clark raises an eyebrow, and doesn't leave. "That so," he says, and it doesn't sound very much like a question.

"Just thinking," Bruce allows, and he—

He could put on a bit of Bruce Wayne, right now. Just enough to ease Clark's mind. Lighten his tone, keep his hands loose in his pockets; rock his weight back into his heels and then forward again, look at Clark and smile. And he knows just which smile he could use. Not too bright, that would give away the game. On the smaller side, but wry, self-aware, acknowledging his own tendency to brood and dismissing it in the same moment. _Nothing serious, I promise_ , he could say, and Clark would watch him a little longer but relax after a beat or two, smile back and duck his head.

He doesn't do it; and after a moment, Clark murmurs, "What about?"

Bruce tilts his head and examines his own reflection in the glass, the way he's offset himself from the cowl in doing it, his eyes and the eyeholes no longer in alignment. "Oh, you know. Fate, destiny, free will. The usual things people find themselves up thinking about at two in the morning."

He keeps his voice soft, steady, but not quite bright enough to turn the whole thing into a joke; and Clark doesn't laugh.

"I do know," Clark says instead, very low.

Bruce glances at him—and he's not looking at Bruce but at the cowl, the suit, with an odd grave expression.

"I used to think I'd chosen this," Bruce lets himself say, and it's easier, somehow, to say it to that look than to Clark's usual bright warmth. "This mission, this life. The Bat." He looks away again and shakes his head, closes his eyes. "Depthless shadows," he murmurs, "a lightless pharos—I suppose it's easy enough to assign a sufficiently vague and ominous phrase all kinds of meaning. And if it wasn't me after all, what does that matter? Would that change anything?

"As if there's any point in asking an unanswerable question." He shakes his head again, digs a thumb into one temple. Waste of time—and he shouldn't be making Clark listen to this, Christ. "Better the bat than the asp, at least," he mutters to himself as he looks up, and—

And of course Clark could hear it. Clark is—Clark's staring at him, eyes wide, face distinctly pale, and for a moment Bruce can't think of anything but Ruby Yeung, clutching a hot coffee in her trembling hands without even noticing that it had spilled across her fingers, her fixed stare and gasping breaths and the litany of words Bruce hadn't known enough to recognize, at the time. Is Clark like that? Has he seen or heard something that Bruce has—has set off or woken up?

But Clark doesn't start speaking, and his gaze doesn't slip past Bruce and go somewhere else. He swallows once, twice, wets his lips and opens his mouth and then closes it again after one long, faltering beat. And then he reaches out for Bruce's shoulder, but he doesn't seem quite able to stop himself there—ghosts his hand up to the side of Bruce's throat, thumb sweeping absent and unsteady along the line of Bruce's jaw.

"It doesn't matter," he says softly. "You're—you're right. It doesn't matter. If it was you, or—I don't care. You understand?"

Bruce feels himself go still. Clark can't possibly know. Can he?

"You understand?" Clark repeats. "I'm not going to let anything happen to you. Whatever comes of all this, in the end, no matter what—I'm not going to let you go."

And for a moment

(—he'd come for Bruce, had touched him with one warm strong hand and held on; had put himself between Bruce and all that fire without even hesitating—)

it's painfully tempting to believe it.

But Clark doesn't know what he's saying. He can't. There's a clock in Bruce's head, ticking down: all the evidence he has suggests that the stars may not have much further to travel. Bruce will solve this problem by then or Clark and the rest of the League will solve it for him. There is no other option.

And when the time does come, Clark can't hold back.

"You'll have to," Bruce says—short, sharp. Clark flinches back, hand faltering, as if the words had been a blow; and enough of one to move Superman, at that. Bruce takes the opportunity to twist himself out from underneath Clark's palm, to turn and walk away without looking back.

 

 

 

**ten months before alignment.**

It's a rule Clark's developed for himself, since the park: Bruce doesn't get the last word.

Because when Bruce gets the last word, the conversation's over; there's no getting it back. It reminds Clark of something Mom liked to tell him when he was in high school, moody and lashing out and six different kinds of unpleasant to be around—that he could argue with her and Dad all he wanted, say every nasty thing he could come up with, as long as none of them went to bed angry. And Bruce—Bruce, Clark thinks, quite possibly isn't aware that there's any other way to go to bed _except_ angry, even if it's only with himself.

But Clark's learned, by now, not to let him get away with it.

Bruce had been cruel, a little—and unprovoked, which had been much more surprising. But it must have been on purpose; there must have been a reason for it. At first Clark had thought it was just that he hadn't understood what Clark had been trying to tell him, that Clark's words had seemed pointless or irrelevant or had—had presumed too much closeness, and Bruce had been irritated enough to deliberately and pointedly give Clark the brushoff.

But after a week or two, Clark has started to think that wasn't it at all.

Not that Bruce had said anything about it. He'd kept his distance from Clark; he'd been polite, collegial, brisk. But he'd also kept _watching_ Clark all the time, searching and even wary. And that's when it had occurred to Clark that maybe Bruce had understood him a little too well.

Because Bruce had to remember that day in the park just as well as Clark did. He had to remember the way Clark had gone straight for him instead of toward the rift that had been forming in the pavement, the way Clark had called him _the Batman_ and told him it needed to stop. Maybe Bruce had realized what it meant; maybe that's what that last jab had been about. _You'll have to let me go, if you're going to kill me the way you've been planning to all along._

As if he thinks Clark's still just waiting for a chance to murder Bruce in the night. After a year with the League, all the times they've saved each other's lives or worked together to save others; as if Clark could set all that aside and just—throw Bruce off a rooftop.

But then Clark's never told him otherwise, has he? Clark's never told him any of it. And looking at that way, suddenly it seems like a miracle that Bruce is even willing to be in the same _room_ with him.

Plus, the rule's still in effect: Bruce never, ever gets the last word.

 

Clark doesn't push it right away. He waits for a quiet day, instead—there aren't a lot of them, but they do happen. He waits for a quiet day and then he follows Bruce's heartbeat across the water and over Gotham, all the way to the Cave. And when he lands, when Bruce looks up, the first thing he says is, "I need to talk to you."

(A statement of fact; an assertion of necessity. Bruce takes those seriously, at least until he can demonstrate to his own satisfaction that he doesn't need to. _I think we should talk_ —way too subjective, way too much wiggle room. _I want to talk to you_ —even worse. And this is too important for Clark to screw it up with a mistake as obvious as that.)

"Do you," Bruce says flatly.

"Yes," Clark says, and then, because there's no point in beating around the bush, "I know about you. Who you are. I should have talked about it with you sooner, and I'm sorry. I—I didn't know how much you knew, but once we were friends—I should have told you."

Bruce keeps looking at him for a long moment, and then away. "You know," he repeats quietly, and he sounds sort of—tired.

Clark doesn't try to make excuses; Bruce wouldn't accept them anyway. "Yes."

"Since the beginning."

"Yeah. I didn't know you would be at the park," Clark adds. "That just seemed like luck."

By _luck_ , he sort of means _evidence_ , but he's pretty sure Bruce is well aware of that.

And Bruce never had Jor-El, or a ship full of data gathered by an empire that spanned galaxies, to connect the dots for him.

"Did you—have you always known?"

"No," Bruce says, almost absent, still staring off into the middle distance; and then all at once his gaze jumps back to Clark, and he gives Clark an odd, strained little smile. "No, I haven't. In retrospect, of course, it was obvious."

Clark can't help frowning at that. "Bruce—"

"I used to waste a lot of time wondering why things were the way they were," Bruce adds, conversational. "Why Gotham was the way it was; what was responsible for its particular brand of misery. But I had the answer right in front of me."

"You think it's you," Clark says slowly.

And that makes Bruce raise an eyebrow at him. "Oh, come on, Clark, don't be naive," and it's all the worse because he's not doing it in any of his slick, sly Bruce Wayne tones; it's matter-of-fact, a little clipped. Just Bruce, saying exactly what he thinks. "That's why you're here, isn't it? That's why you came. You didn't know I'd be at the park—but you did know who I was when you got there. You called me the Batman. You'd been looking."

"Yes," Clark admits.

"And when you found me—you weren't planning to shake my hand and call me a teammate," Bruce says, almost gently.

Clark swallows. He wants to protest; it had only taken a minute for him to understand the sense in what Diana was saying, and thirty more at the most before he'd been rescuing Bruce instead. But—he shouldn't lie to Bruce. Not about this. "No," he says. "I wasn't."

He's expecting Bruce to yell at him—for his lack of planning, his haphazard execution, if nothing else; or for joining the Justice League, letting them think of him as one of them, when he'd started out planning to kill their founding member. But instead, Bruce lets out a long slow breath and relaxes backward into his chair, rubs a hand across his mouth, and looks nothing so much as—relieved?

"Then you really do understand," he murmurs, as if to himself. And then his gaze snaps back to Clark. "You'll still do it, then."

He can't possibly mean that the way it sounds. "I'll still do what, Bruce?" Clark says carefully.

"Kill me," Bruce says. "When you need to. When it happens, when I become whatever I become. You will."

Clark stares at him. "I—what? Bruce—"

"You're a part of the League, now," Bruce says over him, inexorable. He comes up out of the chair in a single easy motion, all Batman; but his eyes are jumping back and forth across Clark's face, harried, searching, and he has a hand half-outstretched. As if to catch Clark, to hold him, because—

Because he's taken a step back, he discovers.

"You're a part of the League, and this is what the League is for. To defend Earth from any and all threats to its continued existence, to protect humanity from harm—"

"Because of you," Clark says suddenly, in the grip of abrupt epiphany. "That's why you made the League, isn't it? Because you found out about yourself." Because Bruce had done his research, of course he had; he'd done his research and he'd learned what he was. He'd come to terms with the reality of a looming threat, and he'd taken steps to respond to that threat. Even when it was himself.

"I couldn't let it happen," Bruce says after a moment, soft. "I can't. And you can't, either. Promise me."

His voice is low, quiet, and utterly implacable; he reaches out and wraps his hand around Clark's wrist, and he's impossible to look away from.

(Funny, almost. Clark's been impaled, hurled into space, drained so thoroughly by kryptonite that he could barely move; but Bruce, right now—the warmth and closeness of him, the sensation of his fingertips against the inside of Clark's wrist, feels like it'll leave a mark deeper than any of that.)

Clark swallows hard. He'd come here to reassure Bruce that Bruce _didn't_ have to worry, that Clark wasn't planning to just—execute him, not anymore. But—

But they have less than a year left, according to the ship. And all Clark has to work from is vague prophecy, lavish and useless descriptions of cracks in the sky, the sea, unholy temples and obscene rituals and darkness swallowing all creation; but whatever it is that's going to happen in ten months, it has something to do with Bruce. Clark hates everything about the idea, and yet he can't justify trading—trading _everything_ , the universe itself, for Bruce—

"You—you aren't going to make me," he hears himself say unevenly. "Not now—"

"No," Bruce says, quiet, almost soothing. "There's no evidence to suggest that would help. It might only make me—become. Or it would go to someone else, and you wouldn't be able to tell who until it was too late."

Jor-El hadn't mentioned that; but maybe he hadn't known it was a possibility.

"But when it's time," Bruce adds, very low. "When it's time, you have to. Give me your word."

He should say yes. He can't justify trading the universe for Bruce—it wouldn't even make sense to try, given that Bruce probably won't be himself anymore in any way that matters, by that point. And yet—

And yet it seems impossible, incomprehensible, that Bruce could die and the universe would continue on afterward in any way Clark would recognize. A year and change, they've known each other; hardly any time at all. It shouldn't be so unthinkable. Clark lived a life without Bruce for a good thirty years, he—he should be more than able to bear doing it again. It's not like they—like he—

Oh.

Oh, Clark thinks distantly. Shit.

"If there's no other way," he listens to himself say aloud, the words somehow scraping their way through his aching throat.

"There won't be," Bruce says, and his tone is calm, even bland; but his grip on Clark's wrist tightens convulsively, and when Clark reaches reflexively to put a hand over the back of his, he doesn't pull away.

" _If_ there's no other way," Clark repeats, more firmly, "then—I will. I will. I promise."

Bruce is staring at him, dark-eyed, so much closer than usual, and for a second Clark almost thinks he might—

"Thank you," Bruce says, hardly more than a whisper, and lets go.

 

 

 

**PART THREE: CONVERGENCE**

 

**two months before alignment.**

The signs are impossible to miss.

Bruce had, irresponsibly, clung to the faint hope that he'd gone astray in his calculations. But the research Clark shares with him, the last cry of a dead world, only reinforces his preliminary conclusions; and as the range of dates he's identified draws nearer, the truth becomes unignorable.

When it had just been him—it had still been possible, surely, to account for everything through a combination of coincidence and ill-timed psychotic breaks. Ruby Yeung had had a similar experience once, had projected importance onto the nightmarish statuette she'd read about, had unwittingly contributed to Bruce's fixation on similar objects; reinforcement, subjective attribution of significance where there was none. The research he'd done, the oblique references he'd found, the crabbed little words he'd read out of ancient musty books bound in moldering leather

(— _and it shall come to pass that He who is Theirs shall rise; They shall speak His name and He shall hear Them and come awake, He who is the servant of Their will_ —)

but relying on sources that old, that obscure, couldn't help but introduce uncertainty.

Clark's data—Jor-El's data, Bruce learns, once Clark explains to him exactly where it came from and why—is both an improvement in some ways and a distraction in others. Krypton's fate had been very different; Jor-El had extrapolated from it in order to draw his conclusions, and many of his results do align with Bruce's, but it can hardly be considered a solid foundation. When they'd shared it with the rest of the League, Hal hadn't immediately been able to corroborate, though he'd agreed to confer with the rest of the Lanterns as soon as possible.

Still, Bruce has plenty to work with. And it's not difficult to tell, as the year wears on, that something is happening: some influence previously relegated to the deepest, darkest shadows is strengthening, welling up, spilling over.

Bruce has always dreamed of creeping horrors, of voices, of eyes, of a towering altar carved with crude images of distorted figures. But the first time he sees the altar when he's awake, he's looking at his television; two dozen people in the middle of Burnley, right downtown, walked out of their homes in the middle of the night and built it out of trash, scrap, anything they could find—without waking up. There's a rash of similar public disturbances caused by a trance-like quasi-sleep state, and the effects are seemingly random: one person will spend ten nights in a row crawling along the street screaming, and their neighbor will sleep soundly, wake normally, without incident.

Debate rages over whether it qualifies as a public health crisis, until the first round of hospitalizations—on the same night, half a dozen people all over Gotham start scratching their own arms, chests, necks, so badly they nearly bleed out. And almost three hundred others start walking to the waterfront; almost a third of them make it all the way to the docks without being stopped or woken, and twenty people drown—just walking silently into the water without stopping, eyes closed.

Bruce isn't one of them. He's—

He's fine.

 

He wakes on an indrawn breath, unseeing, bewildered, blindly terrified. His mouth—hurts; blood on his tongue. It's dark, he's alone—he's always alone—but he can't say the words, he can't say the words. He shouldn't be clawing them into the wall, either, but as long as no one can read them, it doesn't matter—

—as long as he doesn't say the words, as long as they stay inside him—

"Jesus Christ—Bruce," and something's closing around him, restraining. He thrashes, strikes out at it, but it absorbs the blows without faltering; steady and—and warm.

"Bruce, hey, come on. Come on, wake up. Bruce—"

" _Don't_ ," he says, and for a moment he's horrified: he opened his mouth. But it isn't one of the words. There's something wrong with his voice, his throat, he's—he doesn't sound like himself. But he didn't let any of the words out.

"I can't let you hurt your hands, Bruce. Come on. Wake up."

Hands. That's what's touching him. Steady, and warm, and dry; not the black oozing thing that had been waiting for him, pressing closer—

Hands, that's all. At his shoulders, and then sliding carefully to the nape of his neck, thumbs sweeping in gentle arcs along the joints of his jaw.

"Come on, Bruce. It's okay."

And Bruce blinks his eyes open, and says hoarsely, "Clark."

Clark is—Clark is leaning in, their foreheads resting together; this close, Bruce can see a slice of cheek, jaw, the blur of enormous eyes thoroughly out of focus but nevertheless impossibly blue.

"Hey," Clark murmurs.

Bruce closes his eyes again, and, unthinking, greedy, raises his hands to Clark's: slides his palms along the ridged line of Clark's knuckles, the backs of Clark's hands, the bump and dip of wrists; registers the sound of Clark's breath catching but has no room to spare for the effort to interpret it.

"Bruce—"

"It's coming," Bruce says.

This close, he can hear it when Clark's throat clicks in swallowing. "Yeah," Clark says, very softly.

"It's coming, and I'm almost out of time."

"I promised. _If_ there's no other way," Clark says—hardly any louder than he spoke before, but much more firmly. It's a familiar refrain, by now, and Bruce feels the corner of his mouth twitch, hearing it.

As if Diana hadn't been gift enough, undeserved; Clark, too, is always so kind.

But Bruce knows the words to this verse just as well as Clark does.

"There won't be," he says, but he lets his grip tighten for a moment on Clark's wrists, tacit apology.

"Arthur's watching the bay, now," Clark argues. "He pulls the water back if anybody gets too close, at least until Barry can come get them. And the kidnappings you were investigating, that cult in the sewers—Diana and Victor and Hal took care of it. Whatever ritual they were planning to do, they didn't get a chance to finish it. It could be helping. Couldn't it? Maybe we can stop all this before it gets that far."

Bruce doesn't reply. There's no need. Tempting though Clark's optimism might be, Bruce knows better than to allow himself to believe it; and he's increasingly sure that Clark knows better than to believe himself, too.

A shift: Clark's briefly further away, the contact of their foreheads lost, only to lean back in and brush one temple to Bruce's, quick soft scrape of stubble as their cheeks touch. "Come on," he says, against Bruce's ear. "You've torn up your hands again."

"All right," Bruce says, and doesn't open his eyes again—he just holds on, and lets Clark lead him through the dark.

 

 

 

**three weeks before alignment.**

It doesn't get better.

Clark thought—well. He doesn't know what he'd thought. Somehow it had seemed like everything was just an extension of Bruce, Bruce in macrocosm: if the League could keep everyone out there who was dreaming dreams of things even the ship couldn't name from drowning themselves in the bay or clawing their own arms open with their fingernails, that success would reflect itself in Bruce somehow. It would be easier for him; the bad nights wouldn't take so much out of him and the good days would be better. The shadow on him would lift, even just a little.

But that's not how it happens.

Bruce starts to slip away. Which sounds melodramatic, but that's what it feels like. It takes longer and longer to wake him, when he stirs in the night—he's been sleeping at the Hall of Justice, wanting to make sure someone's around to stop him.

("Alfred's earned some uninterrupted rest," he'd said, when it had come up. Which was true, Clark had thought at the time, but what it actually meant was that Bruce didn't trust himself around somebody with no superpowers—somebody he could hurt by accident, half-unconscious and no idea he was doing it.)

And even once he does wake, he takes longer to seem like himself again. Sometimes his eyes are open, reactive, and he's looking right at Clark, but doesn't know him; and he stops hurting his hands, which Clark should be glad about, except he's still managing to carve wild sharp-cornered glyphs into the walls. Like there are—claws, or something, coming and going, never receding quite as far as they used to.

For a while, Clark hopes that's going to be the worst of it. And then the words show up.

 

He doesn't realize what's going on, at first.

It looks like just another bad night. Clark's hearing is better than anyone's, except maybe Diana's, and at this point she only comes to help him if Bruce is being particularly loud, or if either one of them's caught the thick slow drip of too much blood.

He finds Bruce in the hangar, by one of the big industrial sinks—Bruce is always getting oil on himself, and Bruce Wayne can't show up to a board meeting with streaks of black smeared across his forehead. And it's dark, of course, but Clark can see him perfectly well anyway: stripped down to an undershirt, the taps opened up so far the sink's already starting to overflow, and scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing, with the kind of mindless intensity that says he's probably still asleep.

Clark crosses the hangar floor, splashes barefoot through the water starting to run past Bruce across the concrete; and either the shadows in here are even stranger than he'd realized, or—

He squints, uncertain, at the back of Bruce's neck. Even Superman's eyes can't quite pick out the precise boundaries of the shape traced out across the skin. Surely it can't be _moving_.

"Bruce?"

He says it quietly, carefully, because he's found it's best to start out that way, even if he's going to have to say it another five or six times before Bruce so much as twitches. And then he stumbles backward a half-step, startled, because Bruce jerks and whirls around, immediate, and—

And there _is_ something on him. Curves, arcs, sharp angles; darkest at the hollow of the throat, a black so deep it's like void, nothingness, even to Clark, and fading out to dim gray, the barest shadow, where it loops over the muscles of Bruce's shoulders.

The skin around it is red, inflamed and painful-looking, and for a moment Clark thinks, inane: tattoos? But no, it's because of Bruce, who's been scrubbing at it with—with the _steel wool_ they keep by the hangar sinks, jesus—

"What the hell are you doing?" Clark snaps, using a burst of the speed to snatch the steel wool from Bruce's hand.

Bruce doesn't answer. He's staring at Clark, blank and dazed, and—

And to him it must be dark as pitch in here.

"Bruce," Clark says, more gently, and he drops the steel wool with a spatter of water and reaches out to take Bruce by the shoulders. "Bruce, it's okay, it's just me—"

"I thought it was me."

"What?"

"I thought it was me," Bruce repeats, hushed, gaze tracking a beat behind where Clark's face actually is. "I—you know I write things sometimes—"

"I know. It's okay—"

"—and I don't know how, I don't know how, but it could have been me. Except it keeps getting darker. Clark," barely a whisper, so soft Clark has to open up to catch it, "Clark—it's so dark. It's so dark and it's on me and it doesn't wash off, I _can't get it off_ —"

He cuts himself off so sharply, with such a strange angled jerk of his head, that it's like he's choked on the words. And then—

Then Clark sees it. Crawling, seeping, spreading; _underneath_ Bruce's skin, or—or part of it somehow, and no matter how closely Clark looks with his vision, there's no substance to perceive. Just blackness, depthless blackness. And the clearer the strange letters become, sinking into being like a noose around Bruce's throat, the stronger the sensation. Familiar: a persistent prickling scratch in and around Clark's eyes, the same thing he'd felt looking at the inscription on that carved figure from under the ice.

There's a noise, too, this time. Far-off sibilance, like a whisper in another room—the sound a shadow might make, Clark thinks distantly, sweeping closer in the dark.

For a moment, the writing has all Clark's attention; Bruce hasn't moved, a briefly static canvas. But then he does, and Clark blinks and meets his eyes and reflexively recoils, because whatever's standing in front of him, it—it isn't Bruce anymore.

Everything about it is wrong, _everything_. The way it holds its head, the fixed awkwardness of its stance. Clark would have known it wasn't Bruce just from that—because whether he's being Bruce Wayne or Batman, smug and loose-limbed and casual or coiled in anticipation, solid well-earned strength, Bruce knows what he's doing with his body, understands and feels and fully inhabits every inch of it. Clark's never seen him look so thoroughly unlike himself.

Even if his eyes weren't a disorienting endless blankness from edge to edge, flat pale nothing, Clark would have known.

The thing stares at Clark, unblinking, and tilts Bruce's head, with an air of remote disinterest, or maybe disdain. And then it opens Bruce's mouth and speaks, and its voice is—is almost _unhearable_ , tearing raggedly through Bruce's vocal cords, too deep and too loud and too _many_ , layering over itself. It takes Clark a moment to understand that there are words, that it isn't just shrieking or—or laughing at him.

"—a̟͍̗ͦͬ̔h͓̀ͥ̔̌͑ŏͤ͆r͎ͪṅ̝ͧ̊̽̎aͬ̀̒ͭ c͍̣'͗̅̉ͩ ạ̹͋̓̅̌̂h͇̱̻̠'̈́fͨ̽̚'̦̫̲̼̞̂ͨ̏n̑͂͐̐̚ḁ̹̆͊̐̓̓h̖͔̬̘͂͑ n̰̍͋̄ͮ̎g͌̆ h̎ͬ͂̇'̮̪̮̗̦ ǎͩͪh͉̭͍̰—"

When he concentrates on something, Clark can make a memory perfect, eidetic; he doesn't have to understand the words to open up his hearing at them, to carve every vile syllable into his head with flawless precision.

And then it's over, and he reaches for Bruce, catches him by the upper arms, just as his eyes clear.

"Bruce," Clark says carefully.

Bruce blinks once, twice, and swallows, gaze jumping uncertainly around in—in what to him must be intense darkness; but after a moment he does seem able to pick out Clark's face, Clark's eyes. "Clark," he rasps, and it's him, it _is_.

Clark hadn't known quite how afraid he was that it wouldn't be until he finds himself gasping out a breath in relief. "Bruce," he says again, helpless, and he steps a little closer, slides a hand up to the back of Bruce's neck and lets his head drop down to rest against Bruce's shoulder, and lets himself pretend for a moment that he's not going to have to move away again.

 

Clark takes a trip to the ship, after.

Bruce gave him a copy of everything the League already had; the ship's the most complete resource there is on—on the gate Bruce is meant to open, the things that will be waiting beyond it.

He braces himself and then says the words to it, matching his own delivery as precisely as he can to the memory and ignoring the way he wants to shudder, the way his throat goes tight and sore and strange just saying them.

(Bruce had had blood in his mouth. He'd said it must have been from biting his tongue, but—

But maybe it wasn't. Maybe these were words that couldn't be spoken without cutting somehow on their way out.)

The ship is silent for a long moment. Processing, Clark assumes, because trying to generate some kind of translation for this when all the samples the ship has are written—and fragmented, at that—is a lot to ask even of a system this advanced.

Except the first thing it says is, "It is almost time."

Clark frowns up at the ceiling. "I know that—"

"It is almost time," the ship repeats, and Clark realizes belatedly that this _is_ the translation, at the same moment that it adds, "The old chains cannot hold us, and it is almost time."

Clark swallows, and can't ignore the cold foreboding pooling in his chest.

He'd hoped the League could have an impact, make a difference. And for a few weeks, it had seemed like they might. But everything seems to be multiplying: a few hundred people with nightmares, sleepwalking their way to the water, has become thousands, tens of thousands—and there's emergency fencing, now, curfews and checkpoints, but it's still not enough to stem the tide. One cult under the sewers has become half a dozen, a creeping web of hidden activity they've stumbled their way into the middle of, and Bruce has been turning up a flood of matching reports from around the world: kidnappings, grisly murders that look more and more like sacrifices, and the panic, the mania—the dreams.

It's like it isn't just an alignment of the stars, the cosmos. It's—it's _everything_ , every mote and speck and atom in the universe, falling inexorably and inevitably into place, sliding like a key into a lock.

Clark's superpowers can't solve every problem; he's known that since Dad. But the League, together, hasn't taken on anything with this kind of spread, this kind of reach. And for the first time, he's starting to think that nothing they can do is going to be enough.

 

 

 

**two days before alignment.**

No one knows exactly what Bruce might do, when the day finally arrives. They've worked out plans for all kinds of contingencies—if Hal's barriers can't hold him, if he can move even faster than Barry; if Arthur's trident or Diana's sword won't give him pause, if Clark's strength isn't enough.

But at the very least, they did think they knew _when_. As the signs accumulate, as calculations are refined, as the ship's projections of the positions of certain critical stars become more precise, everything has taken on the air of a silent countdown. The sensation is even more acute because everything else has gone silent, too: after weeks, months, of waking dreams and rising crime, public panic and city shutdowns, a sudden hush seems to fall. Not even a natural disaster to break the stillness—which Clark ought to be grateful for, but somehow it only increases the razorwire tension.

And then Bruce disappears.

 

Barry, Victor, Hal, have all had the dreams—not like Bruce, but like everyone else: darkness, a towering altar, the water. The Hall's internal monitoring systems are usually able to wake them before they can do anything, but it wears on them anyway.

(Except Victor, who seems almost happy about it. Happy to still be human enough to be affected, Clark thinks, even if everything else about this situation, he could do without.)

Arthur doesn't say one way or the other, doesn't talk to anyone about it. And Diana's entirely untouched—Clark can just imagine the dark trying to crawl into her mind, finding itself gently and inexorably burned away by endless red-gold light. Bruce seems to have given up on sleep entirely. And Clark—

Clark mostly dreams of Bruce.

Standing at a distance, usually. Looking away, almost always—and yet even without being able to see his face, Clark knows it's Bruce. Sometimes Clark can move; sometimes he can't. Either way, he's never able to close the space between them, never able to call to Bruce loudly enough to get Bruce to look up.

But this time, it's different.

This time, the shadows around Bruce are darker, deeper. Bruce is veiled by them, surrounded, and they're only increasing—as though he's being drawn into them and away from Clark. Clark can move and does; and this time he's actually covering some of the ill-defined ground between them. He reaches out and shouts for Bruce, and Bruce—

Bruce turns his head. Bruce looks at him, and his expression is almost startled. "Clark," he says, lifting his hand, reaching back—but the shadows are closing around him too quickly, swallowing him up, and the ground underneath Clark is suddenly unsteady, shifting and crumbling away from his feet—

For a moment, Clark doesn't understand what's changed: everything is still shifting, tossing, rolling beneath him. But now he's lying down, he's in his room in the personal quarters of the Hall, he's—he's awake.

He rolls up out of the bed and almost falls, jerks up into the air reflexively to avoid hitting anything, and then realizes belatedly that it wasn't him: the floor really is moving. An earthquake—or a tremor, at least. Already starting to die away; and that should be a good thing, but instead Clark is seized with a sudden terrible feeling of urgency.

He flies out into the hallway, where Barry's already clinging to his own doorframe, wide-eyed, saying, "What the hell was that?"

"The Hall's foundations don't seem to have been damaged," Victor is saying, somewhere a little further away, and then Clark's shot past them both.

Bruce won't be in his room, but he never leaves the Hall alone these days—he's stopped trusting that he's the one making his decisions. He has to be here somewhere, he _has_ to.

But Clark can't hear him. Not his voice, not the barest half-vocalized hint of it that could be expected if the quake had startled him; not the tap of keys or rasp of absent fingers against a stubbled jawline, not the brush of woven dress-shirt cotton against itself, not even his heartbeat.

Clark slows, drops down onto the bare soles of his feet even though the floor's still trembling under him, and realizes distantly that he's come to a stop in the equipment room. And the Batsuit is still here—but the cowl is gone.

And all over the walls, not scratched anymore but—but burned, maybe, are those goddamn unreadable words, creeping snaking sigils, so many at once that Clark has to close his eyes against the throbbing ache in his head.

"Clark? Hey, Clark—holy shit."

"Barry," Clark says, without turning around.

"We, uh—no luck raising Bruce on the usual comms channels. But I'm guessing you'd already kind of figured that out."

"Yeah."

They'll look anyway, because of course they will—what else can they do? They have to try.

But Clark's suddenly certain, cold down to his bones with it, that Bruce hasn't gone anywhere where the League is going to be able to find him.

 

 

 

**alignment.**

It's almost a relief, in the end.

Two days of flying around the planet, sweeping each individual degree of latitude and longitude, and all the while aware of the terrible _hush_ —because millions, maybe even billions of people, have barricaded their doors and boarded up their windows, one end of the earth to the other.

And the ones who haven't are—the League does its best to help them, to get them to the emergency quarantine enclosures set up in every major city. But once they've started changing

(— _it might only make me—become_ , Bruce had said, and Clark remembers how his face had looked when he'd said it—)

it's hard to say how much of a difference it makes. It's hard to say whether it helps.

(They don't scream, when the League rounds them up. They don't thrash or struggle or try to squirm out of Clark's grip. They stare at him with flat pale eyes, blank from edge to edge, and they—laugh.)

But when at last the sky goes dim, and the tremors start up again, and the whole of the bay starts to froth and seethe and roil, they're ready.

It was always going to be the harbor, Clark thinks distantly, staring out across all that dark raging water. It was always going to be Gotham. Not that there weren't other places that would have been just as appropriate in all kinds of ways, just as many minds to prey on, just as much gibbering terror to sow, but—

But Bruce is the gate, and the lock, and the key; and Gotham is Bruce's. It was always going to be Gotham.

"Ready?" Hal says, hovering above them on a glowing green disc.

"Ready," Diana replies, steady and even, with the faintest creak of leather as her gauntleted hand tightens around the grip of her shield.

Arthur doesn't say anything, just settles the end of his trident against the rocks with a solid, satisfying thunk; and Barry, beside him, wets his lips and flexes his knees and starts to flicker just a little, the air around him abruptly crackling. And Victor is coming alive, silver and shimmering—the red light shining out of his mechanical eye, his chest, glinting from behind the plates of his armor as it rearranges itself, should probably be unsettling. But against the grim black sky, looming endless night, it just looks warm, alive: like the barest distant sliver of dawn.

And then the first jutting ridge of stone breaks the surface of the bay, and a second later there's dozens, hundreds, of—of _something_ , wet and wriggling, swarming their way up onto the shore.

"Okay, here we go," Arthur murmurs, and slams his trident into the rocks just before the first of them can reach him, the shockwave knocking the whole line of them back toward the water.

Clark follows up by searing a few of them with the laser vision; but the unearthly reverberating shrieks they let out when he does make everyone flinch, so he settles for freezing them for Victor and Hal to shatter instead. It's better not to have to look at them—and he'd rather keep an eye on the structure rising out of the water, anyway.

At first it just looks like some kind of tower. Clark recognizes the look of the altar at the top, the size of it and its skewed geometry; how can he not, when half-built attempts to recreate it have been all over the news? But it keeps going, higher and higher—massive stone blocks, water streaming down their sides, and more and more of them. Other structures, walls and looming arches, nonsensical corners, labyrinthine edges piling up on top of one another. The clouds overhead are twisting around it, spiraling, like—

Like a tornado, Clark thinks, swallowing hard. And then his gaze catches on the altar, now at least twenty or thirty stories up, and this time he spots the figure standing in front of it.

Bruce.

He goes still, staring helplessly, and it almost costs him—a sweep of air, the clang of metal, and he realizes with a jolt that something cold and gelatinous is half-coiled around his ankles, his shins, his knees. A moment later it sort of falls apart, shriveling up into thick dark dust, which is probably because of the way Diana cut it in half.

"Thanks," Clark says. "Diana, I—"

"I see him," Diana agrees. "Take this," and she holds out her lasso, glowing with solid steady light. "If it's at all possible to return him to himself, the lasso should be able to do it."

"Right," Clark says. He honestly hadn't thought that far along; it's just that he's spent too long looking for Bruce to find him and _not_ go to him. But Diana's right, he should—he should maybe have a plan. "Right. Thank you."

He wraps one hand around the lasso's coils, but Diana doesn't let go of it right away. "I know what he must have asked of you," she says after a moment, gently, and then pauses and swings without looking to lop off a grasping tentacle that had been headed for her waist. "And you must do it, if it should become necessary."

"I know that. I—I will," Clark makes himself say, and—and he's holding the lasso, it's wrapped all the way around his fingers, so it must be the truth.

But Diana doesn't look down at his hand to make sure; she's just watching him carefully, and after a moment she smiles. "But I have something to ask of you, too," she says. "Don't give up on him—or yourself."

Clark takes a deep breath, lets it out again, and keeps his hand where it is. "I won't," he says, and that must be true, too; not that he hadn't intended for it to be, but it's good to hear himself say it, to _know_.

Which might be why Diana prompted him to, judging by the way her smile widens. "Good," she says, and then lets go with a nod, and Clark nods back and then leaps into the sky.

 

From above, it's much easier to see the top of the tower, and the full breadth of the dank maze-city that's rising up out of the water. The altar is simple enough, a vast rough-hewn shape, but there's something unsettling about the angles of it, the way its sides intersect, the lines of its edges.

In front of it, there's a broad space, stone stretching out around and then dropping away with vicious suddenness to the black city below. Hardly anything to cast a shadow, except the altar; but there are shadows anyway, piling up around the edges, creeping and crawling and spilling over. Some of the—the swarming tentacle-things from down in the water, Clark thinks, or something like them: because some of the shadows are moving, grasping, feeling around.

And Bruce is standing in the middle of it all. [Except, of course, he's not quite Bruce anymore](http://jolbalrok.tumblr.com/post/173682588785/superbat-reverse-bang-2018-i-had-the-pleasure-to).

The writing is still there—not fading in and out, but _there_ , stark and black and thick-lined, unmissable. Especially because Bruce is bare to the waist; and Clark recognizes, with helpless relief, the old familiar scars across his shoulders, chest, ribs. But they aren't alone anymore.

It's not quite the bat symbol Clark's used to, not the way it looks emblazoned across the suit, or even cast up into the sky at night. It's strange, stretched, the wings wide and ragged, and so dark it looks almost carved _through_ Bruce's chest instead of marked out onto it.

And below the waist—Clark thinks for an instant that something has hold of Bruce, is wrapped around him, but that's not it. He's _changed_ , a great distorted mass of limbs, fluid and writhing, coiled around themselves. The color and texture are familiar; not like the shadows, Clark realizes distantly, but like the undersuit.

Had Bruce had it on? Partway, even, not fully fastened, when the thing took hold of him? And it had just made the undersuit part of him, a second skin, rather than bother to shed it?

It wouldn't seem as plausible if Clark couldn't see Bruce's face.

Bruce's eyes are flat pale nothing again, and that, Clark was expecting. But the cowl had been missing from the equipment room, too, and that's because Bruce has it on.

Has it on, or—or it has him, it _is_ him. The lines where it crosses Bruce's cheeks are almost right, almost normal; but it follows the contours of his cheekbones far too closely, darts of black dipping into the hollows just above his jaw, lying so seamless against his face that only the color shows Clark where it stops and Bruce's skin begins. His brows, his ears, are _part_ of it, his whole forehead. And where the cowl had projections, the bat-ears, now there are dark twisting horns, smooth, throwing off just the barest glint in the dimness.

Clark drops in a rush of air, lowers himself more slowly the last few feet and then settles onto the ground a few strides away from the thing that isn't quite Bruce. He lets most of the lasso slide out of his hand and slither to the ground, one end still wound through his fingers; and the shadows hiss and shriek and flinch away from the warm golden light, retreating back to press themselves against the foot of the altar. And as if in response to the overpowering gloom, the great black silhouette of the altar, the lasso glows brighter still—brighter than Clark has ever seen it, brilliant.

The thing in front of him turns around and smiles, incongruously sweet. "Oh," it murmurs, and its voice is and isn't Bruce's, Batman's—there's a modulator in the throat of the cowl. It must have been absorbed during the transformation. "We have been waiting for you."

"Let him go," Clark says, and the thing laughs; it's weird to hear Batman's growl applied to it, when Bruce almost never laughs in the suit.

"Waiting such a very long time," it adds, as though Clark hadn't spoken. "Did you look for the owner of this body at all? It thought you would come; it did not believe us when we told it otherwise. But now, surely, it sees. You did nothing. You had already forgotten it—you were glad to be rid of it."

 _Now, surely, it sees_ —that has to mean Bruce is still in there somewhere, that it didn't just burn Bruce out of his own head.

And Bruce has to know it's full of shit; but then he's been stuck with it for two days and counting, feeling it take hold of him and listening to its taunting. "No. You're wrong," Clark says, just in case Bruce can hear him. And if Bruce can see even a little bit out from behind those colorless eyes—the end of the lasso's still wrapped around Clark's hand. He has to know Clark's telling the truth.

"As if it matters," says the thing in Bruce. "What shall come to pass shall come to pass. You cannot change that."

It waves Bruce's hand, imperious, and Clark has a split-second awareness of something shifting before he's caught.

He blurs—but the shadows blur, too, and he feels them wrap around his ankles, his thighs, his waist. The instant they touch him, everything falls out of his head. He can't keep up the speed, can't remember how to use it, can't think at all. They have him and they're cold and horrible and he can't stand it, he can't _stand_ it, he can't—he can't get away—

—how long have they been touching him? He can't remember—

—can't remember anything _but_ the vast, unbroken dark—

When he comes back to himself, he's on his knees; the shadow-grip has wound around him, pressed up close, so cold he can feel his skin cracking apart, healing, cracking again. Too slow. He should be healing faster. They're—they're draining him somehow, the sunlight he's stored inside himself not enough to hold up against so many shadows.

The lasso. Clark can't feel his hands anymore, but he forces himself to open his eyes, and it's still there: his fingers are clenched tight around it, the long trailing loop of it winding across the stone in front of him.

"What shall come to pass is beyond your comprehension," the thing in Bruce is murmuring to him, almost gently. "You and all your kind shall raise up dread temples in our honor, and shall fall down in helpless worship before us. You shall look upon us and destroy yourselves, and we shall walk among what ashes remain of you and laugh. And you, Kal-El—"

Clark jerks at the name, startled. Surely this thing can't know it, and even if it did, why would it use it? Why would it care to address him personally, even with his Kryptonian name, unless—

"—we shall ..." The thing in Bruce pauses, and Clark would think it was for effect except for the way Bruce's brow furrows, the stuttering jerk of Bruce's head. "We shall—keep you."

Clark blinks. It sounds almost—dismayed, surprised by its own words; the muscles in Bruce's jaw are knotted, tensing and working.

"We shall keep you," the thing repeats slowly, and now it seems to be warming up to the idea. "Yes. You shall survive, alone of all this festering miserable universe; we shall tear apart the very stars, rend asunder all that is, but you—you—" It falters again, that cold smug expression flickering. "You _must_ remain—"

"Bruce," Clark manages. He gasps it out quick: the shadows are clawing up his shoulders, his throat, and he's sick with distant horror at the idea that they could—they could get inside his _mouth_.

But if Bruce is still in there, he should know Clark's with him. He should know he's not alone up here.

"Don't call me that," and it's the thing's distorted voice that snarls it, but— _me_ , not _us_. Bruce's head jerks again, a weird sharp shake, and in three quick strides he's crossed the distance between them, taken Clark's face in one cool pale hand. "You will remain," he murmurs, "and I will keep you. I can't—I can't let you— _Clark_ —"

For an instant, Clark's heart leaps. But then Bruce's fingers tighten around his chin, harder than Bruce should be able to grip; almost hard enough to bruise, when the shadows have drained Clark like this. And Clark can tell it isn't Bruce anymore even before the thing slants Bruce's mouth in a sudden awful smile.

"Yes, very well. We will keep you," it says, low, and then it tips his face up and kisses him.

It's—nothing about it is right. The unnatural chill, the taste against Clark's tongue: dry and bitter, acrid, something spoiled near to rotting.

Except it's still Bruce's mouth, Bruce's hand against Clark's jaw. And if Clark can't stop him, if this is the last five minutes they're going to get—

Clark lets his eyes fall closed and kisses back, leaning into it as hard as he can when the shadows are still wrapped around him, hoping Bruce can feel it.

The thing pushes away from him with a jerk. It stares down at him with those empty eyes; and then it blinks once, twice, and for the moment just between the two, Clark's looking into _eyes_ again, wide and dark, familiar.

"Bruce?"

Gone again. The shadows surge forward with a low unsettling susurration, and the thing tips Bruce's head back and laughs. "A noble effort," it says. "But we are immune to such petty trickery. We are gods the like of which this world has not known in untold eons," and it reaches down and wraps Bruce's fingers around Clark's numb hand, and yanks the end of the lasso from his grip.

Clark had forgotten he was even holding it, had forgotten everything but Bruce—but the length of the lasso is sprawled across the stone in a loop. And Bruce or whatever was in him or both had stepped within the bounds of it, to get to Clark.

Clark would almost be tempted to believe that it hadn't worked, if he hadn't caught that split second between blinks. But it _had_ been Bruce again just then. He'd swear that it had been.

_Don't give up on him._

As if there's anything Clark can do about it, if he's wrong. He squeezes his eyes shut. He made Bruce a promise, and he'll figure out some way to keep it if he has to, some way to get loose. If he can get a hand on the lasso again, maybe, and hold it against the shadows on him instead of just letting it hang there—they'd have to let go of him, then. And even without his strength, his speed, he could still make a grab for Bruce; knock them both off the tower, let them hit the water, and even if the impact isn't enough, he could—he could hold Bruce under—

He promised. But—but only if he has to.

Two minutes. Surely he can give Bruce two minutes. Maybe just holding the lasso will weaken the thing's grip on him. The way he'd said Clark's name—he _is_ in there. Clark just has to give him a chance.

The thing coils the lasso up in Bruce's hand, quick precise motions, and walks back toward the altar. "But first we must open the gate," it murmurs, and the shadows sway closer with a hungry hiss of approval. It reaches, absent, into the thickest of them, and Bruce's hand comes back with a—a blade in it, a knife, black and curved and wickedly barbed, and of course utterly lightless, even though with the angle he's holding it at, it should be reflecting the shine of the lasso in his other hand. "You, Kal-El, we require."

The shadows surge around Clark, and for a second he can't help but thrash—the awful sensation of them on him had dulled, mercifully, the longer it went on, but they're _moving_ against him now, clinging and pulsing and _touching_ him, god, god, make it stop—

"Good," he hears, and—they've dragged him forward, that's what it is: toward Bruce. "You will be the first. The gate will not open while the altar is clean. We will cut out your heart, Kal-El, and eat it while you watch, while you bleed onto the stone; and we will fill the hole in you with shadows. You will fall on your knees, you will love us—"

Clark's eyes are still closed, but it doesn't matter. He can feel the blade against his throat, when the thing makes Bruce lift it. Cold as ice, colder, and the edge is—is dull. Jesus, this is going to hurt—

"—you—you'll—you'll stay with me—"

 _Me_. Bruce. "Yes," Clark rasps. Either the shadows loosen or—or he still has some strength left, enough to yank one arm free and reach blindly for Bruce's hand. He wraps his fingers around Bruce's on the knife, squeezes, and that's why he can feel the way Bruce's weight shifts.

A horrible shriek grates against Clark's ears, and then he jerks and almost falls. The shadows are—are off him, a sudden light passing so near his closed eyes that he flinches from it. Bruce's hand opens under his, a sudden spasm of muscle; the knife clatters away across the stone with a screech of metal, and Clark hangs on and makes himself look up.

He has to look away again just as fast, half-blinded, but the afterimage stays blazoned on the backs of his eyelids: the silhouette of the altar against the gray sky, and beyond it a darker shadow still—colossal, an impossible figure, rising out of the sea beyond the harbor, vast and scaled, spread-winged, in every dimension hopelessly disorienting. And around the altar, cast with a single desperate swing of Bruce's arm, the lasso—alight, searingly brilliant, the very stone of the altar crumbling away under its touch.

His hand is still around Bruce's. He holds on tight, grapples with the other for—for Bruce's bare wet shoulder, his back, and together they lurch, feet skidding. The shadows are screaming, Clark's ears ringing with it, but underneath that he can hear the scrape of rock shifting. He wraps his arms around Bruce more tightly, grips with all the strength he has left and throws their combined weight backward; and they tip for a moment, suspended at an impossible angle, straining; and then the altar comes down.

There's a thunderous crack—the entire tower, Clark realizes dimly, splitting beneath them. They've come down hard against damp stone, they're sliding, and there was only so much space up here to start with; he feels an instant's weightlessness, the beginning of free fall, scrabbles blindly for the edge, and his other arm is still around Bruce's waist—but the whole thing is toppling, stone twisting underneath them at stomach-churning angles, the rush of wind abruptly deafening as they plunge through the air, and the black city beneath them is already crumbling away into the water—

— _you'll stay with me_ —

He can't fly; there's not enough left. He wraps himself around Bruce instead, doesn't let go, and the last thing he sees as they fall is the bright graceful arc of the lasso, still wound half around them, following them down.

 

 

 

( **twelve minutes after alignment.** )

Something solid. An edge—a surface. Stone under his fingertips. He pushes, reaches higher; rock, again, higher, higher—

He comes up out of the water with a gasp, drags himself up onto the shore and coughs once, twice, racking and helpless, the whole aching mass of his body jerking.

A splash. He flinches away from it, tensing reflexively.

"Bruce—Bruce, are you—"

Hands against his back, his side, his cheek. There's—there's something on his head, close-fitting, wet; at the same moment that he realizes it, he's abruptly certain he wants it _off_.

He reaches up to grasp at it with one shaking hand, scrabbling for the edges of it, and then someone else is helping him, peeling it away, and the air against his bare face is the best thing he's ever felt in his life.

"There we go—it's okay, it's okay, it came off—"

"Clark," Bruce says.

It's almost unintelligible; his throat feels stiff, raw, and he's painfully hoarse. But it comes out, and it's—it's him, nothing else in there saying it through him, making him—

"Hey, whoa, hold on. Hold on, don't hurt yourself," and Clark's saying it because—because Bruce swung his hands, hit out at him. He'd tried so hard to do something, _anything_ , and it hadn't worked; he'd been straining with everything in him to drop that goddamn knife, and he couldn't do it.

But now he can. Now his body moves when he wants it to, and doesn't when he doesn't. He—

He's the only one in here. He bites the inside of his cheek to steady himself against the sudden irrational surge of hope. He shouldn't leap to conclusions; it's been—since he was a child, since the cave, there's always been a shadow in there that he can't quite shake, something crouched in a dark corner watching him.

(Ruby Yeung had said _affected_ , had said _sensitive_. But it would have been indulgence, unearned, to let himself assume that all responsibility for his nature could be laid at other feet. He'd wanted to believe it was a matter of external influence preying upon him; who wouldn't?

 _It wasn't you_ , Alfred had said, and Bruce had been desperate to believe him—)

But he prods the edges of his mind, and finds nothing there to flinch from. It's—quiet.

It's quiet, and he's himself. It's bewildering, disorienting, and for a moment he can't do anything but drag in a ragged breath and slump against Clark in relief.

Clark. Who followed him up there, who he tried to—he was going to—

"I'm fine," Clark says, and he catches Bruce's infuriatingly unsteady hand in his own, guides it right where Bruce had meant to put it: against the hollow of his throat.

The blade had—had pressed, there, but no more. He had come so close, so terribly close; and standing there watching his own hand set that knife to Clark's skin, _we will cut out your heart and eat it_ —he couldn't have borne it. He'd have cracked in half, whatever was left of him when that thing was in control, and crawled off gibbering into the darkest corners of himself, and he'd never have come back out.

But the lasso had still been in his hand. By himself, he couldn't have stopped it. But the certainty, the absolute desperate necessity of it, that he _could not_ do this to Clark, had felt like the only truth left in the world, up on top of that shadowy tower; and the lasso had forced it to the surface, because that was what the lasso did. Just for an instant, but that had been enough time for Bruce to look up, to move—to strike out with the lasso, and bring the altar down. 

"Not even a scratch."

Bruce looks up and meets Clark's eyes. Clark is, beautifully, impossibly, smiling at him.

"And you," Clark adds, gentle. "You're okay?"

Bruce glances down at himself. He has legs. Feet, even. The lower part of the undersuit is something he's wearing again, instead of his skin; the upper portion of it must be back in the equipment room where he'd dropped it, still half in control of himself.

(God only knows what he would have turned into if the thing had managed to get him into the full suit.)

His chest is blank, at least as far as he can tell. He looks at Clark again, and he doesn't want to ask, isn't going to; but his hand must twitch or tense against Clark's throat, because Clark looks back at him searchingly and then says, "Oh—the words are gone, too. It's—you're fine. Back to normal. For you," he adds, with a wry little tilt at one corner of his mouth.

Bruce snorts a shaky breath out his nose to let Clark know how funny that isn't

(— _back to normal_. Or—or better than that. It's possible. Isn't it? If the voices, the dreams, the things that had whispered to him in the darkness are truly gone—)

and Clark just grins wider and then reaches out to—ah. To touch him back.

(The thing hadn't wanted to kiss Clark. How could it have? It had no concept of the act, no understanding of its purpose. Bruce had managed to push forward only the clearest, most fundamental of thoughts: that Clark could not die, could _not_ , and his bone-deep inexorable certainty had been inextricable from the reason why—)

He swallows, and can't decide whether to speak, what to say, wordless in the face of the enormity of it. _I'm sorry I almost cut your heart out and sacrificed you to reality-eating monsters._ _Thank you for stopping me from destroying the universe._

But Clark, as ever, saves him. "Maybe redesign the cowl before you put it back on? For me," and Clark's teasing, tone mild. But the way he slides his hand up to Bruce's jaw, the look in his eyes—and then he leans in, slow, and brushes a quiet kiss against one corner of Bruce's mouth.

How Clark of him, Bruce thinks distantly. To be—to be _shy_ about it, sweet and careful and unassuming, at a time like this: when there are still stone blocks the size of houses toppling into the middle of the harbor behind them, cold black water washing up against the rocks to splash their feet, dark clouds still roiling angrily overhead.

He catches Clark by the back of the neck before Clark can move away again, lines their mouths up properly—freezes, for a moment, because what if this only makes Clark think of that _thing_ , holding him there and—but Clark makes a soft pleased sound against his lips, leans into him and slides that warm hand down against his bare chest, and Christ, that feels good—

He lingers more than he should; but surely no one could blame him. He was underwater a little too long to press the issue, though, and has to break away after another moment to cough again.

"Sorry," he rasps, but Clark's already shaking his head.

"No, no, getting the water out of your lungs actually should be your top priority, that's the wrong thing to apologize for," Clark says, and then his brow furrows up in the way that means he's scanning Bruce internally. "You look all right, but let's not take chances. The others can't be far away." He glances up, along the length of the shoreline: they came up on an uneven stretch of rocks just below the seawall, and—

And the lasso came up with them, gleaming up here and there from the spaces between the rocks, one end still caught around Clark's ankle. Bruce reaches for the other end, which is behind him, and coils it up—and of course it comes easily, readily, without tangling. Clark started with the other end, and they meet in the middle, hands full of light.

"I—I would have done it."

Bruce glances up. Clark is staring down at the loops of the lasso across his palms. And then he looks up too, meets Bruce's eyes, and his face is grave and drawn.

"I promised you, and I meant it. If you hadn't—if there wasn't any way to get you back—I would have done it. Or I'd have tried, at least. I wouldn't have let you become that thing forever, if I could stop it."

"I know," Bruce says, very low. "I know that," and he leans in across all that bright golden truth, his own will and mind and body; free, at last, in every way, to kiss Clark again.

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] The Old Ones Are Coming](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14620890) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)




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